Smoke from more than 850 active Canadian wildfires blanketed the northeastern U.S. and Great Lakes region last week, triggering air quality alerts and raising questions about what employers owe outdoor workers where no specific wildfire smoke regulations exist.
Unhealthy to hazardous air quality was recorded across parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, affecting major cities including Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
Nearly 40,000 wildfires have burned more than 3.6 million acres in the U.S. so far in 2026, well above the 10-year average for mid-July, with federal officials saying fire activity already resembles conditions normally not seen until later in the season.
Only California, Oregon and Washington have permanent regulations requiring employers to monitor levels of fine particle pollution and reduce outdoor worker exposure at set air quality thresholds. No equivalent rules exist in the newly affected states, though federal OSHA's general duty clause requires employers to protect workers from recognized hazards.
Wildfire smoke related conditions, including aggravated asthma, COPD or heart conditions, may qualify as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, requiring employers to engage with affected employees on reasonable accommodations such as remote work, longer breaks or N95 respirators.
Smoke damage claims tend to have a long tail. Verisk data shows roughly 30 percent of smoke related claims from the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires were filed within 30 days, while 35 percent of claims from comparable past events surfaced two years later.
Health officials recommend employers reschedule strenuous outdoor tasks, move work indoors when possible, and provide properly fitted N95 respirators for workers who must remain outside during unhealthy conditions.
Read more via WLNS, Insurance Business Magazine, The National Law Review, and CBS News
The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index, which tracks where hiring is likely headed, dropped to 106.69 in June from an upwardly revised 106.90 in May. That points to slower hiring ahead.
The index combines eight different labor market signals to predict shifts in job growth before they show up in the official jobs numbers.
The index fell for a second straight month in June, after May's reading was revised down.
The share of people who say jobs are hard to find rose to 22.5 percent in June, the highest it's been since January 2021.
New unemployment claims rose for the second month in a row to 222,000, the highest monthly average so far this year.
The share of small businesses saying they can't fill open positions jumped three points to 32 percent.
Consumers' pessimistic hiring outlook fueled much of June's weakness in the ETI, which is consistent with the prevailing 'low hire, low fire' labor market environment."
Temporary help hiring rose again in June, adding 47,800 workers in the first half of the year.
Three of the index's eight components dragged it down in June, driven mainly by pessimism about job availability and rising unemployment claims. Five components pushed it up, including job openings and temp hiring.
Read more via The Conference Board
New research suggests the real labor challenge ahead isn't AI taking jobs away. It's a shrinking pool of workers to fill them, and AI might end up being the fix rather than the threat.
Demographer Steven Ruggles forecasts the US workforce will grow by just 9.1 million people over the 10 years ending in 2030, the smallest increase in that span since the 1950s.
He then expects the workforce to actually shrink by 2.1 million people over the following decade, driven by a falling birth rate that started in the mid 2000s.
A smaller workforce could give workers more leverage and push wages up, while giving employers a strong reason to invest in AI and other labor saving tools.
Separate research found that places with falling birth rates tend to see higher pay and economic output per worker, along with more patents for labor saving technology.
If there's an unprecedented labor shortage, this is going to be a huge incentive to adopt labor-saving devices, like AI."
Read more via The Wall Street Journal
The Department of Labor is preparing changes to PERM, the process employers must go through before sponsoring a foreign worker for a green card, according to NewsNation.
The DOL plans to overhaul the system, calling the update a modernization made necessary by changes in how companies recruit.
The rules haven't been updated since 2004.
Right now, employers have to prove no qualified American worker is available for the job, and that hiring a foreign worker won't hurt pay or conditions for similar American employees.
The change comes alongside other recent moves, including a revised H-1B visa lottery and a proposal to raise wage minimums for H-1B workers.
DOL calls the changes 'modernization,' but a key question is whether the changes will bring clarity and make the process more efficient or result in additional complexity and slow down a system that is already lengthy and can be challenging to navigate."
Read more via NewsNation
A federal court struck down the Trump administration's $100,000 fee on H-1B applications for workers living outside the US, but the fee is still in effect while the government appeals, according to Bloomberg Law.
A judge ruled on June 8 that the fee was really a tax, which only Congress has the power to create, and that the government skipped required rulemaking steps when it rolled the fee out.
The government got a temporary win on June 12, keeping the fee in place while the case moves through the appeals court.
A different federal court came to the opposite conclusion back in December and upheld the fee, which could eventually push the issue to the Supreme Court.
A final ruling could take six to 18 months, and there's currently no process for refunding employers who already paid the fee.
Employers with H-1B applications that would trigger the fee are being advised to hold off filing until the appeal wraps up.
Read more via Bloomberg Law
Teens and young adults make up a much bigger share of hiring every summer, but new ADP data shows their unemployment rate is still far higher than older workers, even as their pay growth has cooled off.
Workers aged 15 to 24 usually make up about 30 percent of new hires each month, but that jumps above 40 percent in June.
Historically, the June unemployment rate for workers aged 16 to 19 runs around 16 percent, more than three times the rate for workers in their prime working years, which is under 5 percent.
Teen unemployment in June has risen for four years straight and is now at its highest point in a decade outside of the pandemic, hitting 14.6 percent this year.
Pay growth for newly hired teens and young workers, which topped 10 percent back in 2021 and 2022, has slowed and settled at 3.7 percent this year.
The labor market for young workers is still defined by volatility, even in a period of overall strength."
Read more via ADP Research
New research finds that job seekers without a criminal record often react negatively to companies that advertise fair chance hiring policies, but that reaction can be softened depending on how employers explain the policy.
Researchers found 88% of job postings described fair chance hiring policies using compliance focused language, leading applicants without a criminal history to assign negative stereotypes to those companies.
Companies that instead framed the policies as part of a broader commitment to fairness and ethics consistently reduced those negative stereotypes.
Federal data suggest up to 6.9 million Americans are incarcerated or on probation or parole at any given time, a population employers have increasingly viewed as an underused talent pool.
Researchers say the same framing approach could apply beyond criminal history hiring to other groups who face workplace stigma.
This approach could extend beyond criminal history hiring to other groups that face stigma in the workplace."
Read more via HR Dive
A new Quest Diagnostics report finds that hair testing, which detects drug use over a longer window than urine testing, found positivity nearly doubling since 2021, raising questions for HR about how to respond.
Hair test positivity across the general U.S. workforce reached 19.1 percent in 2025, up nearly 46 percent from 13.1 percent in 2021.
Marijuana accounted for the majority of positive hair tests, at 15.1 percent, up nearly 59 percent over the past five years.
Healthcare had the highest overall drug positivity among industries at 5.8 percent, followed by retail trade and professional and technical services.
These findings demonstrate the importance of a comprehensive approach to impairment mitigation in the workplace."
Fentanyl positivity in the general workforce declined by nearly half year over year, from 0.55 percent in 2024 to 0.28 percent in 2025.
Employers continue to navigate a shifting legal landscape following an executive order to reclassify marijuana, with some HR experts recommending employers shift toward impairment based testing rather than blanket drug screening.
Read more via Quest Diagnostics and HR Dive
Businesses in the UK are hiring part time workers at the fastest pace in three years, as cautious employers try to keep up with demand without committing to permanent staff, according to KPMG and REC data.
A part time hiring index hit a three year high of 52.7 in June, up from 52.2 in May. Anything above 50 signals growth.
The permanent hiring index rose to 49.1 in June from 44.1 in May but has stayed below the growth threshold for 45 months straight.
UK unemployment reached 4.9 percent in the three months through April, up from 4.6 percent a year earlier, and job openings fell to a five-year low of 707,000.
Separate data found UK workers got an average 3.5 percent pay raise in the three months through May, the fifth reading in a row in that range.
After a long recruitment winter, these figures show truly hopeful signs. Temporary and contract work once again leads the way, as firms react to demand without yet feeling confident enough to commit to larger-scale permanent hiring."
Read more via The Times
China: China left a numeric target for urban job creation out of its five-year economic plan for the first time in at least three decades, explicitly citing AI's growing impact on employment. The government's human resources ministry said it would instead keep new job creation at a "considerable scale" and set annual targets flexibly, after setting a target of more than 55 million new urban jobs over the prior five-year period. (Bloomberg)
Germany: Germany will now require workers to get a doctor's note in person starting on their very first sick day, ending the option to call in sick by phone, as part of a broader set of labor and pension reforms from Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The change follows research showing the average German employee took 19.5 sick days in 2025, which Merz called a "competitive disadvantage." Doctors' groups and unions have pushed back on the move, while Australian employers are separately calling for a crackdown on online sick notes. (Yahoo Finance)
Poland: Nearly 60 percent of Polish job seekers have abandoned a job application because the commute was too long, according to a study from job board Pracuj.pl, with the rate reaching 71 percent among candidates aged 18 to 24. Most respondents said commute time influences their sense of a job's attractiveness as much as pay and job stability, and 37 percent said they would abandon an application entirely if the posting didn't specify the job's exact location. (SIA)
South Korea: South Korea's ruling party is considering gradually raising the retirement age from 60 to 65 by 2037, to close the gap between when workers must retire and when they can start collecting their pension. Unions want the change made right away, but business groups and some economists warn it could squeeze entry-level hiring at big companies and government agencies unless wages are also reformed. AI is adding to the pressure on entry-level jobs, something one business source said the retirement age change would only make worse. (The Korea Times)
Spain: Spain's workplace absenteeism rate hit 7.2 percent of agreed working hours in the first quarter of 2026, its highest level in five years, according to Randstad Research. Sick leave accounted for most of the absences, with an average of more than 1.2 million workers out sick each day, while the industrial sector posted the highest absenteeism rate among major sectors at 7.4 percent. (SIA)
