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Staffing hours held a year-to-date high, and the Fed raised rates.

SIA and Bullhorn's indicator put US staffing hours 7 percent above the holiday-adjusted 2025 week, initial claims fell to 196,000, and the FOMC lifted the funds rate a quarter point to 3.75 to 4 percent.

By Pedagogue Systems · September 21, 2026

US staffing hours held a year-to-date high, jobless claims fell, and the Fed raised rates.

SIA and Bullhorn published their staffing indicator on September 15 for the week ended September 5. US staffing hours ran 7 percent above the same week of 2025 and 0.2 percent above the prior week. The annual figure is adjusted for Labor Day, which fell in the comparison week a year earlier. SIA records the level, an index reading of 103, as a year-to-date high. Industrial was up 12 percent and office and clerical was down 7 percent on the year. The 7 percent follows the 10 percent we carried on September 14 for the week ended August 29. The smaller figure reflects the holiday-adjusted base, and the level did not fall.

Seasonally adjusted initial unemployment claims were 196,000 for the week ended September 12, down 10,000. The four-week average was 203,250, and the Labor Department labels the advance figure subject to revision. ADP's NER Pulse estimated private employers added 16,250 jobs a week over the four weeks ended August 29. That is a second consecutive increase and up from the 9,500 we carried on August 30, and ADP labels it preliminary. The Conference Board's Leading Economic Index fell 0.1 percent in August to 99.5. Weaker consumer expectations, building permits and jobless claims drove the monthly decline. Its six-month growth rate was minus 0.1 percent after turning positive in July.

The Federal Open Market Committee raised the target range for the federal funds rate by a quarter point on September 16. The new range is 3.75 to 4 percent, and the vote was 12 to 0. The statement says job gains have kept pace with the workforce, the unemployment rate has changed little, and inflation remains elevated. It is the first increase since July 2023, on the Fed's own rate history. ASA chief economist Noah Yosif wrote that the decision "is likely the first of several interest rate hikes in a multimonth tightening cycle." He added that it will strain labor market momentum. In his reading the market holds near full employment because labor force participation is declining, the contraction Hiring Lab measured over twelve months last week.

Pedagogue Systems' view. Each series measures a different thing over a different period, and none of them contradicts the others. The staffing week ended September 5 and the claims week ended September 12, both before the September 16 decision. Neither can show an effect of the rate increase in either direction. The LEI is the softest reading in the set, and it is a composite of ten components rather than a measure of staffing. Its monthly decline came from expectations, permits and claims, and its six-month rate is one tenth of a point below zero. Whether the tightening cycle Yosif expects reaches hours on assignment is a question for the indicator's October releases, which this week's data cannot answer.

Adecco is rolling an agent out to 27,000 employees, and ManpowerGroup reports 25,000 AI-led interviews. Neither ties the counts to a placement or financial result.

The Adecco Group announced on September 15 that it is rolling out Salesforce's Agentforce Coworker to 27,000 employees in more than 40 countries. The rollout runs under an enterprise agreement and follows pilots in the UK and France. The company's own release says agentic AI is already deployed across recruitment workflows in ten countries representing 50 percent of Adecco business revenues. It says Coworker draws on more than 2.5 million agent-candidate interactions since April 2025 and is powered by Anthropic's Claude. The 27,000 is rollout scope, not a measured count of active users. On August 9 we carried the 50 percent figure and the 70 percent target. What is new is the employee-facing rollout and the interaction count. ManpowerGroup's self-reported figures, in its sustainability report release on September 17, are more than 25,000 AI-led interviews and 81 percent of employees using AI tools daily. Eight in ten of the interviews took place outside traditional working hours, which the company credits with widening candidate access. The release gives no collection period for either figure. Neither company attributes revenue, margin, fill rate or time to fill to any of these figures.

Pedagogue Systems' view. These disclosures have the shape we described on September 14 for ADP and Recruit. Each is an activity count published without the outcome it is meant to indicate. That does not mean the results are absent. It means a reader cannot tell from the published material whether the deployment changed a business result. The disclosure that would settle it is a placement, fill-rate or margin figure with the AI contribution isolated, and neither company has published one.

The White House renewed an H-1B payment requirement whose implementation a court vacated, and DOJ settled a third contractor discrimination case.

On September 18 the President signed an Executive Order on the H-1B program. It directs the Secretaries of State, Labor and Homeland Security to consider a sponsoring employer's recent or planned layoffs of similarly situated US workers. That applies when they decide labor condition applications, petitions, visas and entry. The order does not make a layoff an automatic denial. Section 3(b) gives the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division 30 days, to October 18, to begin reviewing data from labor condition applications already submitted. A separate Proclamation renews the restriction on entry of certain H-1B workers unless the petition carries a $100,000 payment. The renewal runs twelve months from 12:01 a.m. Eastern on September 21. DHS may grant national-interest exceptions at its discretion. It applies to workers outside the United States who need admission, not to H-1B workers already here.

On June 8 the District of Massachusetts, in State of California v. Mullin, vacated in its entirety the DHS and State Department actions that implemented the 2025 payment requirement. The court found them in excess of statutory authority. On July 24 the First Circuit denied the government's motion to stay that vacatur pending appeal. It held the government had not made a strong showing it would succeed on the merits, and the merits appeal is pending. The court vacated the agency actions that implemented the 2025 proclamation. It did not vacate the proclamation itself.

Separately, the Department of Justice announced on September 14 that Accenture Federal Services, Accenture plc and Accenture LLP will pay $25 million to resolve False Claims Act allegations. DOJ alleged that AFS certified compliance with the anti-discrimination clause in its federal contracts. At the same time, DOJ says, AFS considered race or sex in hiring, promotion and development-program decisions from 2017 onward. About $11.6 million is restitution. Accenture denies liability, and the settlement establishes none. It is the third such settlement this year, after IBM in April and Deloitte in August. The agreement alleges demographic targets and does not allege the use of any automated screening tool.

Pedagogue Systems' view. The two instruments do different things. The order directs officials to take a sponsor's layoffs into account. They must consider them, but a layoff is not a new statutory ground for denial. The proclamation gives express instructions. DHS is to restrict decisions on unpaid petitions for workers abroad, and employers are to retain proof of payment before filing. The whole is to be implemented consistent with applicable law. What the documents do not resolve is how those instructions operate while the court order vacating the 2025 implementing actions stands. That is a question for the agencies and the First Circuit, not a choice a sponsor gets to make. The Accenture settlement rests on DOJ's allegation that a knowingly false compliance certification was material to payment under federal contracts. That theory routes discrimination allegations through the False Claims Act, and Accenture denies it. DOJ says most federal contracts contain the same equal-opportunity clause, so a staffing firm holding one carries the same representation.

Nurses told AMN they intend to stay in the profession more than with their employer, and WHO counts one in four doctors near retirement.

AMN Healthcare released its 2026 Healthcare Workforce Outlook Survey on September 15. It drew 4,040 respondents across nine leadership and frontline roles, surveyed from February 24 to March 31. The company reports that 79 percent of nurses intend to remain in nursing while 51 percent plan to stay with their current employer. It also reports that 18 percent of nurses consider current staffing levels adequate. As a healthcare staffing company surveying its own market, AMN is publishing vendor figures. WHO published the first report in an annual health workforce accounts series on September 18. It counts more than 70 million health and care workers worldwide and projects a shortage of 11.1 million by 2030. From data covering 122 countries, it finds nearly one in four doctors over 55 and expected to retire within a decade.

Pedagogue Systems' view. Intent to stay in nursing and intent to stay with the current employer are 28 points apart in AMN's aggregate results. The release does not publish the joint table that would show which respondents sit in that gap, or whether any of them would take an agency assignment. The inference that the gap describes a recruiting pool for supplemental staffing is one a staffing company would want to draw, and AMN is one. It is not something this survey measures. WHO's retirement figure is a global average that says nothing specific about US supply. It does put an age structure behind the shortage number that a headcount alone does not show.

What we are watching.

SThree publishes its third-quarter trading update on September 22, ahead of Circle8's October 7 deadline under Rule 2.6. ADP publishes its next NER Pulse the same day. Colorado's Attorney General has said any interim updates to the draft rules on automated decisions will be posted by September 23. The hearing is scheduled for October 26, which is also the scheduled comment deadline. Governor Newsom has until September 30 to act on SB 947 and the other AI-workplace bills we covered on September 7. The Transparency Coalition reported no action as of September 18. The BLS publishes the September employment situation on October 2. The Labor Department's 30-day window on labor condition application data runs to October 18. Harver announced on September 17 that it acquired Symphony Talent, and BoomerangHR announced a $12.7 million seed round on September 14, with no valuation disclosed in either case. Mobley v. Workday stands as we published on September 14. The July 13 scheduling order sets a class certification hearing for March 9, 2027, and no liability has been established.

About Pedagogue Systems. Pedagogue Systems builds Cassion, a governed data foundation for staffing operations. It serves shift-based, credential-heavy operators in healthcare, industrial, and aviation staffing. It helps staffing operators keep operational records attributable and auditable before they automate decisions.

Sources.

This Brief was produced with AI assistance and adversarial review, then edited by a human before publishing. AI and people both make mistakes, so please verify anything critical independently. How we produce the Brief.

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