A job on a slaughter or cutting line at a beef or pork plant, held at any point in a 24-year stretch, may now count toward a payment. Class counsel says settlements in the red-meat wage-fixing case total $202.8 million, and workers employed between January 1, 2000 and February 27, 2024 have until March 26,…

January 1, 2027 is the date by which states must generally have Medicaid’s new work rule running, but it is a ceiling for states and not a starting line for every enrollee. Some states are already ahead of it, others may win more time, and the federal court that was asked to stop the rule…

Two of the country’s biggest employers are now defendants in federal disability suits brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and both turn on the same question: whether a deaf person was given a sign language interpreter. The suits were filed a day apart in the Eastern District of Virginia, one over a Walmart…

Wages paid on or after January 1, 2027 in Maryland will carry a new line on the pay stub: a contribution to the state’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance program, known as FAMLI. The worker’s share is 0.45 percent of wages, matched by the employer. The deduction arrives a full year before the first benefit,…

For the first time, New Jersey’s minimum wage for agricultural workers will reach $15.00 an hour, and the cash wage an employer must pay a tipped worker rises to $6.61. Both changes take effect on January 1, 2027, and both come from the same annual adjustment. They sit on separate tracks, though, and one does…

A single worker is set to receive $650,000 from a Houston-area pediatric hospital to resolve a religious-discrimination charge, according to a September 30, 2026 announcement from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The employee asked to be excused from certain duties on religious grounds, was refused, and was then discharged, the agency says. Neither the…

A laboratory management company in Los Alamos, New Mexico, has agreed to pay $2.8 million to resolve charges that it denied religious and disability accommodations to its COVID-19 vaccine and testing policy. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced the agreement on September 29, 2026. The sum is an amount Triad National Security agreed to pay,…

Two numbers sit at the center of the Treasury Department’s September 30 announcement about defaulted federal student loans, and neither is ten million. Treasury reports more than 5 million borrowers who have been in default for over six years, plus an additional 5 million who entered default in under a year. Alongside those counts, Treasury…

The Education Department has moved the autopay enrollment deadline for a temporary 1 percent student loan interest reduction from September 30 to December 31, 2026. The student aid trade association NASFAA reported the change on September 30 and cites a count of nearly 2 million borrowers already enrolled. For a household carrying a federal loan,…

For 22 years, a man with cerebral palsy worked at an AMC movie theater in Owings Mills, Maryland. In a settlement announced Sept. 22, 2026, AMC agreed to pay $56,000 under a two-year consent decree resolving an EEOC lawsuit in which the agency alleged the chain denied him two small workplace changes and then cut…