The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has proposed eliminating the EEO-1 report, a workforce demographics filing requirement that has been in place since 1966.
The proposal, issued alongside a public meeting held on July 21, 2026, argues that the annual reporting requirement may actively harm the workers it was designed to protect.
According to the proposal’s preamble, “EEO Reports are inconsistent with EEO law because they may encourage employers to discriminate against employees who are not considered ‘minorities,’ may promote racial stereotyping, and may encourage employers to engage in discrimination to avoid potential EEOC enforcement actions or to address perceived inequitable outcomes.”
The Commission also cited significant financial costs, noting that “in the last five years alone, the Commission has incurred over $18,000,000 in federal contractor costs collecting these data.”
The EEOC stated it retains investigative authority to request records relevant to individual charge investigations, describing that power as “a more reliable, narrowly tailored, and cost-effective tool to support its enforcement efforts.”
Public comments on the proposed rule are due by August 24, 2026, with a public hearing scheduled for August 11, 2026.
On the same day as the EEOC meeting, the House Committee on Education and Workforce approved two bills with significant implications for employers across the country.
The American Franchise Act (H.R. 5267) would establish that a franchisor is only a joint employer of a franchisee’s workers when it exercises “substantial direct and immediate control” over the terms and conditions of their employment under both the NLRA and FLSA.
The second bill, the Heat Workforce Standards Act of 2025 (H.R. 6213), would block OSHA from finalising or enforcing its 2024 heat illness and injury prevention proposal, or any “substantially similar standard,” with both bills now advancing to the full House floor.
In a rare display of bipartisan cooperation, Senators John Boozman (R-AR) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) are jointly sponsoring the More Paid Leave for More Americans Act (S. 5017), which would fund grants to states that establish paid family and medical leave programmes.
The legislation would also create an “Interstate Paid Leave Action Network” designed to promote consistency across state-level paid leave provisions, with a companion bill introduced in the House.
The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division issued two new opinion letters this week addressing compensation questions arising from remote and flexible working arrangements.
Opinion letter FLSA2026-9 concluded that an employee’s mid-morning and mid-afternoon commutes, taken to avoid rush-hour traffic while working from home at the start and end of the day, would not qualify as compensable time under the FLSA.
The division determined such travel “would not qualify as FLSA-covered ‘work,’ as the facts provided indicate that such travel time would be an ‘ordinary’ commute that is a normal incident of employment.”
A second opinion letter, FLSA2026-10, addressed a field service engineer who drives an employer-provided vehicle directly between home and client sites, concluding that time spent receiving morning assignments is not compensable as it is “incidental to the use of an employer’s vehicle.”
However, the opinion letter found that time spent “calling clients to schedule and arrange the details of appointments, including scheduling other field service engineers,” is compensable, as is subsequent travel to the first client of the day.
This week also marks 89 years since the U.S. Senate voted 70 to 20 against the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to add justices to the Supreme Court for every sitting member over the age of seventy who declined to retire.
Roosevelt lobbied for the bill during a fireside chat and sent his attorney general, Homer S. Cummings, to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, but the effort was undermined by the death of Senate Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson and the retirement of Associate Justice Willis Van Devanter.
The Supreme Court’s decision in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, in which Associate Justice Owen Roberts switched his position on New Deal constitutionality, removed much of Roosevelt’s justification for expanding the bench, earning the ruling its lasting nickname, the “switch in time that saved nine.”