Compliance Round Up – A 3-1 NLRB Majority, Tighter USCIS Filing Rules, and Minnesota’s Sick Leave Rules (August 2026)

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Written By
Jennifer Kiesewetter
Published On: August 11, 2026

Jenny Kiesewetter is a practicing ERISA and employee benefits attorney who partners with HR teams on a wide range of workplace compliance matters — from benefit-plan obligations to day-to-day HR policies and regulatory requirements. Her guidance helps employers spot risks early, navigate regulatory change, and make informed decisions that support both employees and the organization.

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The Senate gave the National Labor Relations Board a 3-1 Republican majority, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services changed what happens when a filing arrives incomplete, and Minnesota adopted rules governing how employers administer its sick leave law. Five stories follow, from Washington to the Seventh Circuit.

Federal News

Effective Date: The U.S. Senate confirmed both nominations on August 7, 2026, by a vote of 51 to 47.

What’s Changing

On August 7, 2026, the U.S. Senate confirmed James Macy and David Prouty to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by a vote of 51 to 47, as part of a slate of 74 nominations taken up en bloc under S. Res. 817. Macy, a Republican and a U.S. Department of Labor official, spent decades in private practice as a management-side labor attorney. He fills a vacancy and joins Chairman James Murphy and Scott Mayer to give the Board a 3-1 Republican majority. His term runs to August 27, 2030. Prouty, the Board’s lone Democrat, won a second term running to August 27, 2031. One seat remains open.

Prouty’s prior term was set to expire August 27, 2026, and a recess without action would have cost the Board its three-member quorum. The majority can now revisit Biden-era precedent on employer speech, workplace rules, and bargaining orders, including Cemex, Stericycle, and McLaren Macomb.

Board practice calls for at least three affirmative votes to overturn existing precedent, a threshold the previous 2-1 quorum could not reach. A Board majority does not rewrite the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), though. It sets these standards case by case, which means another company’s dispute can change the rule you follow.

What This Means for HR:

  • Pull your handbook and workplace policies now, while the Stericycle standard is still the one being applied.
  • Track pending Board decisions on employer speech, captive-audience meetings, and bargaining orders.
  • Watch severance agreement templates, since McLaren Macomb limits on confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses are also in play.

Effective date: None. Senator Bernie Sanders reintroduced the bill August 6, 2026.

What’s changing

Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, reintroduced the Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act on August 6, 2026, with 4 Senate cosponsors, all Democrats. Representative Seth Magaziner introduced a House companion joined by 86 members. The bill would let every worker accrue at least 1 hour of paid annual leave for every 25 hours worked, and full-time workers would earn at least 2 weeks a year.

Workers could use the leave for any reason at their standard rate of pay, and the bill would bar discrimination against anyone who takes it. No federal law requires paid vacation today. The bill is endorsed by the UAW, SEIU, AFT, AFSCME, and a long list of other unions and worker advocacy groups, and it would set a federal floor where none exists, so it is worth tracking.

What this means for HR

  • Watch the bill, but keep operating under current law, which sets no vacation floor.
  • Model an accrual rate of 1 hour per 25 hours worked against your existing paid time off (PTO) plan.
  • Apply the state and local paid leave mandates that already carry their own accrual rules.

Effective date: Policy Alert PA-2026-05 took effect immediately on August 5, 2026, and applies to benefit requests pending or filed on or after that date.

What’s changing

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) updated its Policy Manual through Policy Alert PA-2026-05, restoring officers’ discretion to deny a benefit request without first issuing a Request for Evidence (RFE) or a Notice of Intent to Deny (NOID). Missing required initial evidence is one trigger. A request with no legal basis for approval is another, and the regulations do not limit the list to those two. In either case an officer may deny outright or issue an RFE instead.  USCIS said the prior ask-first policy drove up processing times and invited frivolous, placeholder, and substantially incomplete filings.

USCIS expects eligibility at filing and through adjudication. A thin Form I-129, I-140, or I-765 can draw a denial with no second chance to cure the gap, and a complete filing that falls short on the merits no longer reliably draws a NOID first. The regulatory response windows themselves are unchanged, at 12 weeks for RFEs and 30 days for NOIDs, but officers may now set shorter deadlines case by case. USCIS also dropped the extra 14 days it used to add for notices mailed outside the United States, leaving only the standard 3-day mailing allowance.

What this means for HR

  • Audit every sponsorship filing so each petition carries all required initial evidence at submission.
  • Build lead time into work-authorization and green-card timelines to absorb a denial.
  • Respond to an RFE or NOID in full, since USCIS treats a partial response as a request for a decision on the existing record.

Trending State News

Effective date: The rules took effect July 6, 2026, after adoption on June 29, 2026.

What’s changing

The Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry (DLI) adopted permanent rules interpreting the state’s Earned Sick and Safe Time (ESST) law. Coverage reaches any employee anticipated to work at least 80 hours a year in Minnesota for that employer, and the employer has to make that call in good faith by looking at the employee’s schedule and where the hours fall. An undesignated year defaults to the calendar year. Switching from accrual to frontloading takes written notice and cannot take effect until the next benefit year, and late notice leaves the accrual method in place unless the employee agrees.

Employers must not require employees to use ESST. An employee loses ESST protection by declining to use it for a covered absence, by using it for an uncovered purpose, or by not supplying documentation the employer properly requested. Where a pattern or a clear instance suggests misuse, employers may request documentation before the three-day threshold without retaliating.

What this means for HR

  • Request documentation early where a pattern or clear instance suggests misuse, such as repeated leave around scheduled days off or repeated 30-minute absences at the start or end of a shift.
  • Time any switch from accrual to frontloading for the start of a benefit year, since mid-year switches do not take effect.
  • Review bonuses tied to hours worked, sales, or attendance, which you may deny for ESST use only if you also deny them for other leave.

Around the Courts

Decided: July 27, 2026 (Lutz v. Froedtert Health, Inc., U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, No. 25-2802).

What’s changing

In Lutz v. Froedtert Health, Inc., the Seventh Circuit upheld a Wisconsin health system’s overtime math under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and Wisconsin’s overtime statute. A certified class argued that the employer credited pay the workers had already earned against the overtime premium it owed, and that it wrongly left holiday premiums out of the regular rate.

The court disagreed. The employer folded shift and weekend differentials and extra pay into the regular rate, then applied a half-time multiplier, matching Department of Labor guidance. The class’s alternative, splitting the first 40 hours from the overtime hours, would pay two employees differently for identical hours based only on when their differential hours fell. Holiday premiums stayed out under FLSA Section 7(e)(6) because they exceeded one and one-half times the bona fide rate for like work, a rate that includes the shift differential on top of base pay. Running that test after folding holiday pay into the regular rate, as the class proposed, would trigger the endless recalculation the Supreme Court warned against in Bay Ridge Operating Co. v. Aaron. The decision controls in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.

What this means for HR

  • Confirm differentials flow into the regular rate before the multiplier applies.
  • Verify any excluded premium is at least one and one-half times the bona fide rate for like work in nonovertime hours, differential included.
  • Decide whether a holiday premium qualifies for exclusion before computing the regular rate, not after.

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