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Nobody asked you first.

The US added 29,000 jobs in September, and July got revised from plus 21,000 to minus 10,000. Wage growth slipped to 3.0 percent. A day earlier, Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that AI is now the number one reason US employers give for cutting jobs this year, and that hiring plans fell 23 percent from a year ago.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Poland set its minimum wage for 2027. Colombia raised its floor by about 23 percent last January. And on October 1, New Jersey started enforcing a rewritten test for who counts as a contractor.

A budget, a wage floor and a legal test all moved in the same two weeks. Nobody consulted the companies that have to live with them.

I have run operations in markets where the rulebook never stood still. The companies that did fine were not smarter or luckier. They simply had someone on the ground whose job was to notice before the rest of us did.

Most international teams are planned like a purchase order: agree the number, sign, forget. But a team is not a purchase order. It is a living thing in a place where the rules keep changing, and the cost of that change lands on whoever is not watching.

So when you build your 2027 plan, do not only ask what the team will cost. Ask what can change on you before March, and who is responsible for seeing it coming.

Plan for the rules to move, and put someone on the ground whose job is to notice.

This Week's Number: +3% vs +23% : Poland's minimum wage rise for 2027 versus Colombia's for 2026. Same kind of rule, very different surprise.

1. AI is now the top reason US employers give for cutting jobs.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas's September report (published October 1) counted 43,281 announced cuts, down 20 percent from a year ago, and 573,195 for the year so far, down 39 percent. Look at the mix instead. AI is cited for 120,136 cuts this year, about 21 percent of the total, the leading reason so far. Technology accounts for 165,925 cuts, up 54 percent. And September hiring plans came in at 90,787, down 23 percent from last September.

The headline is that layoffs are falling, and that is what comfortable people read. The mix says something different: fewer cuts, concentrated in the roles AI touches first, with hiring plans shrinking. These are not cyclical layoffs waiting to be refilled. They are companies deciding to run smaller teams in expensive places. Do not expect the old org chart to come back. Expect a smaller one, and then ask where the rest of the work sits and who runs it. A layoff is a budget cut. Where you rebuild is a structure decision. An employer of record is a smart way to test a new market with a handful of people. Once you are rebuilding a function of twenty, someone has to run it.

2. Poland's 2027 wage floor: up 3 percent, and that is the good news.
The government has set Poland's minimum wage at 4,950 zloty a month from January 1, 2027, up from 4,806, with the hourly rate at 32.30 zloty. The Social Dialogue Council could not agree, and the cabinet's own proposal estimates about 1.58 million people will be affected. For comparison, Colombia raised its floor by roughly 23 percent for 2026, and Mexico by 13 percent.

Nobody hires a Warsaw finance analyst at minimum wage, so the floor is not your cost. What matters is how it pulls on the salary ladder above it, and how predictable it is. Poland told employers the number more than three months before it bites, and the number is modest. Cost certainty is a feature. A market where the floor moves 3 percent on long notice is a different proposition from one where it moves 23. Neither is wrong, but they need different budgets, different contracts, and someone local who reads the decrees in December instead of discovering them in payroll in January.

3. New Jersey rewrote the contractor test, and the date was October 1.
The state labor department's adopted rules (N.J.A.C. 12:11) spell out how the ABC test applies across wage and hour, wage payment, unemployment, disability and sick leave. A business has to prove all three prongs: the worker is free from its control, the work sits outside its usual business, and the worker runs an independent trade of their own. If it cannot prove even one, the worker is an employee. Labels and preferences do not change that.

This is a US state rule, but anyone who built an overseas team on contractor invoices should read it as a preview. Regulators in many countries apply the same instinct: look at the relationship, not the label. A person working your hours, on your tools, under your manager, is not independent, whether they sit in Newark or Bogotá. Contractors are fine for a project. They are a liability for a team you manage every day. An employer of record is the clean, fast way to fix it, and I would use one. The longer-term answer is someone who owns the employment relationship and the operation together, so the team looks like what it is.

Three wage floors, three very different surprises

Caption: Latest annual change in the national minimum wage in three of our core hiring markets. Colombia: 2026 decrees (1,750,905 pesos a month). Mexico: CONASAMI, 2026 (daily minimum 315.04 pesos). Poland: Council of Ministers, set September 15, 2026, effective January 1, 2027 (4,950 zloty a month).

Same rule, three completely different experiences. A Colombian employer who budgeted flat in 2025 got a 23 percent surprise. A Polish one got a number it could have forecast in its sleep. The wage floor is a policy decision, not a market price, and policy moves on its own calendar. If your 2027 model has one growth assumption for every country, it is wrong in at least two of them.

Before your 2027 plan goes to the board, try one exercise. Pick a country you are budgeting for and write down the three things that can change on you before March: the wage floor, the working-hours rule, and the test for who counts as an employee. Then write down who is watching each one. Most teams find that the honest answer for at least one of them is nobody.

If you want a second pair of eyes on it, I am happy to go through it with you. Thirty minutes, your numbers, no slides from me. No pitch. Just insight from someone who has built these teams in the markets you are considering.

Book a strategy session and bring your country list.

📖 New here? My book, Winning the Global Talent War, is the full playbook behind this newsletter.