Signal File: the workplace week is back up for negotiation

This week’s signals show decisions about where and how long people work being reshaped by federal policy, industrial bargaining, sector demand and local opposition. Employers are committing to buildings again, communities are pushing back against the infrastructure behind AI, German manufacturers are reopening a settlement on working hours that has held for four decades, and the case for compulsory attendance is being tested against evidence.

Sixty years of workforce data at risk

The Guardian has analysed six decades of workforce demographic data that the Trump administration now plans to stop collecting. Since 1966, employers with 100 or more staff, and federal contractors with 50 or more, have filed an annual EEO-1 report to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission breaking their workforce down by race, sex and ethnicity across ten job categories. The Republican majority on the commission has voted to rescind the requirement, arguing the reporting may itself encourage discrimination.

In action: If public benchmarks disappear, organisations will need internal measures to understand representation across roles, sites and seniority.

Germany reopens the working week

Senior executives at Germany’s largest industrial companies are calling for a return to the 40-hour week without extra pay, arguing that labour costs are eroding the country’s competitiveness. Voices at Mercedes-Benz and toolmaker Stihl are among them. The 35-hour week has stood since a seven-week metalworkers’ strike in 1984, and moving back to 40 hours on unchanged weekly wages would lengthen working time by around 14% at no additional cost to employers.

In action: As cost pressure builds, the flexibility debate may shift from where people work to how many hours they owe the company.

Law firms lead the office comeback

Legal businesses signed leases for 12.2m sq ft of US office space through June, a 17% rise year on year, following a record 7.3m sq ft in the second quarter alone, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Law firms accounted for 14% of total demand across the ten largest office markets, and 43% of deals signed so far this year were expansions rather than renewals or contractions. Activity is spreading beyond New York and Chicago into smaller markets, with the report linking the volume of legal deals to growth among AI firms.

In action: Office recovery is being led by specific industries rather than by blanket mandates, which changes how location and footprint decisions should be framed.

Communities push back on data centres

New polling from The Economist and YouGov finds nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose data centre construction in their own community, with about half saying new construction is bad for the country. Democrats are the most negative at 61% to 14%, independents split 53% to 13%, and Republicans are closer to even at 39% to 31%. Even people who use AI tools are more likely to call the construction a bad thing than a good.

In action: The buildings that power AI-enabled work are becoming a local planning fight, with consequences for siting, energy supply and community relations.

The case for mandates meets the evidence

A study of 7,704 healthcare employees, published in Frontiers in Psychology, compared fully remote, hybrid and fully onsite workers on wellbeing, connection and retention. Remote employees scored highest on a five-point wellbeing measure at 4.22, against 4.12 for hybrid and 3.89 for onsite. Differences in how the three groups described their workplace culture were too small to be significant. What predicted retention was wellbeing itself, with each one-point rise linked to roughly a 29% lower probability of leaving.

In action: The evidence points to how people feel at work as the stronger predictor of retention, which shifts the question from how often they come in to what they find when they do.