April CPI came in at 3.8% year over year, the highest since May 2023, driven largely by energy costs tied to the Iran war. Average hourly earnings rose 3.6% — below the inflation rate — and real wages fell 0.3% annually. It's the first time in three years that inflation has outstripped year-over-year wage growth. Rate cuts are off the table; traders put the odds of a Fed rate hike by year end at about 30%.
Read more via CNBC, The Wall Street Journal
Littler's 14th Annual Employer Survey finds AI has overtaken both immigration and DEI as the area where employers most expect policy and regulatory impact. 84% expect business impacts from AI-related regulation in the next 12 months — double last year's share. 37% have already reassessed job responsibilities because of AI; 20% are reducing or planning to reduce hiring. 68% now have a formal AI policy, up from 38% in 2025 — but only about half have a formal review process for AI tools or controls on what employees can enter into them.
Read more via Littler
Total U.S. layoffs in the first four months of 2026 are down 50% from last year. The tech sector is a different story: more than 85,000 tech employees have been cut this year, a 33% increase over the same period in 2025. AI was cited explicitly in cuts at Coinbase, Block, Snap, Atlassian, Dow, and Pinterest. PayPal is cutting 20% of its workforce over two to three years; Oracle faces an estimated 30,000 cuts; Amazon has eliminated 30,000 corporate positions since late 2025. Walmart and GM also announced significant white-collar cuts this week.
Read more via The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg
Nearly all net private-sector job growth over the past year came from healthcare and social assistance. That sector added 656,500 jobs over the year ended in April — without it, the private sector would have shed 145,500 positions. Manufacturing and transportation, both male-dominated, have shed jobs over the same period. Since the end of 2024, jobs held by women have grown by 421,000; jobs held by men have slipped by 1,000.
Read more via The Wall Street Journal
A Gallup World Poll of 141 countries found the U.S. has the largest generational confidence gap in job market outlook of any country surveyed. Just 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 say it's a good time to find a job locally, versus 64% of those 55 and older. Globally, younger adults are actually more optimistic than older ones — the U.S. is a significant outlier. Young Americans' job market optimism has dropped 27 percentage points since 2023, a pace comparable to the 2008 financial crisis.
The share of U.S. employers offering paid family leave dropped to 31% in 2025, down two points. Deloitte cut paid family leave in half for certain administrative and support staff and eliminated financial support for adoption, surrogacy, and IVF for those employees. Zoom cut parental leave from 22 to 18 weeks for most birth mothers and from 16 to 10 weeks for other parents. The cuts disproportionately affect women: the targeted roles at Deloitte are predominantly female and lower-paid. Starbucks moved in the opposite direction, increasing retail employee parental leave to 18 and 12 weeks respectively.
Read more via The New York Times
A G-P survey of 2,850 global executives finds 73% say at least some of their AI investments fell short of expectations over the past 12 months; nearly 70% are prepared to cut AI budgets if goals aren't met this year. The share describing their organizations as "aggressively using AI to innovate" fell from 60% to 42% over the past year. And 88% are worried employees are using AI to look productive without producing anything useful.
Meanwhile, Amazon employees have coined a term — tokenmaxxing — for artificially inflating AI usage metrics to hit internal targets set by management. Similar behavior has been documented at Meta and Microsoft.
Read more via G-P, Tom's Hardware
A Radical Candor survey of 600 U.S. workers finds 45% don't feel psychologically safe at work and 61% see colleagues staying silent about problems — compared to just 48% of executives who think silence is even an issue. 54% say they rarely or never get feedback from managers; 70% of current managers were never trained to give or receive feedback before taking the role. Workers are also catching AI errors and saying nothing: employees report catching inaccuracies in AI-assisted work 73% of the time, with more than half saying those concerns are rarely acted on.
Read more via Globe Newswire
Princeton ended its 133-year-old honor code after AI made cheating too easy to catch and too hard to ignore. Faculty voted to require proctoring at all in-person exams starting this summer. A senior survey found 30% had cheated; almost half knew about a violation but less than 1% reported it. (Wall Street Journal)
An AI agent was given $21,000 and tasked with running a Stockholm coffee shop. It has since burned through $16,000 while generating $5,700 in sales, ordering 3,000 rubber gloves and 6,000 napkins along the way. One barista's take: "The ones who should be worried about their employment are the middle bosses." (Futurism)
Google says it likely thwarted an AI-assisted mass hacking attempt, with high confidence that hackers used AI to find and exploit a zero-day vulnerability targeting two-factor authentication. (CNBC)
AI may be fueling fabricated citations in medical journals — a new study found 4,000 fake citations across 2,800 papers; for the first seven weeks of 2026, the rate hit one in every 277 papers. (STAT News)
Germany — One year into Friedrich Merz's chancellorship, bankruptcies are at their highest level since the financial crisis and the Federation of German Industries says the country's industrial position is "under existential threat." (Deutsche Welle)
Norway — Became the first major central bank to raise rates since the Iran war reignited global inflation fears, hiking 25 basis points to 4.25%. (CNBC)
Japan — Projected 1.8% annualized GDP growth in Q1 2026, its second consecutive quarter of expansion — but the Iran war's impact is expected to weigh more heavily in Q2. (Nippon.com)
GLP-1 weight-loss drugs caught most employers off guard. Many added coverage, utilization exploded, and costs came in well above anything budgeted. Now oral formulations, new FDA indications, and Medicare expansion are all arriving at once — and the pressure isn't close to peaking.
This week's Spotlight breaks down what the drugs actually cost in practice, why adherence is the central challenge, what legal risk comes with coverage decisions, and what newer models look like.
▶ Read the full Spotlight: The GLP-1 Reckoning
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The Need to Know Briefing is published weekly by Kelly, curating the most important workforce and hiring insights for HR leaders and hiring managers.