On Oct. 7, 2026, OSHA cited J.D. Wagoner Excavating of Chambersburg, Pa., for one willful, two repeat and three serious violations after a worker died when a 12-foot storm sewer trench collapsed, and proposed $254,884 in penalties. The citations include no protective system against cave-ins and no competent person assigned to inspect the trench daily.

The rule is long-standing: a trench 5 feet or deeper needs sloping, shoring or a trench box unless it is entirely in stable rock, and a competent person must inspect it daily. Nothing new takes effect this month; the case is a reminder of what a miss costs. Take an 18-person plumbing shop with two crews replacing sewer laterals at 6 to 8 feet. Assume a trench box rents for $200 a day and the shop digs 40 days a year: $8,000. That is far less than this case's proposed $254,884, before lost days on a stopped job. Penalties are proposed and can be contested, so the final amount may differ. Plumbers, excavators, general contractors and landscapers doing drainage or irrigation mains should care. HVAC service shops, cleaners, accounting firms, law firms and agencies can ignore this.

Zapier says a deploy starting October 7 caused some outbound Custom Actions and Zapier MCP requests to include duplicate query parameters, which a subset of connected apps rejected even when inputs were valid. A fix went out on October 12 at 09:40 UTC; Zapier says standard app actions in Zaps were not affected and it has found no evidence of data loss.

Most Zapier users can skip this. Standard app actions, the prebuilt steps most Zaps use, were not affected. It matters only if a Zap uses a Custom Action, the step you build yourself against an app's API, or if you connect an AI assistant to your apps through Zapier MCP. Example: a 15-person accounting firm uses a Custom Action to create a client record in its practice-management software for each intake form. Assume 6 new clients a day. Over the four working days from Wed. Oct. 7 to Mon. Oct. 12, up to 24 records may never have been created, if that app was one that rejected the duplicated parameters. Zapier says not every app or request failed, and its status page does not say failed runs were retried. So the gap is yours to find. The likely damage is quiet: an intake that never reached the client list, or an invoice or job that was never created.

On Oct. 8, 2026, the FTC said T-shirt maker Gildan Activewear and wholesale distributor S&S Holdings amended a contract that had barred Gildan from offering S&S's pricing and discounts to S&S's competitors, and the agency closed its Robinson-Patman Act investigation. The FTC said the matter builds on last week's Robinson-Patman settlement with Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits, the first such case resolved by a federal enforcement agency in over 20 years.

For most trades and service firms, nothing changes this month. The FTC did not order any price cut and did not say what shirts will cost. The signal is that the FTC is again using the Robinson-Patman Act, which generally bars sellers from charging higher prices to smaller buyers who compete with bigger ones for the same goods. Take a 25-person agency that resells branded Gildan shirts to clients through a smaller distributor. Assume it buys 2,000 blanks a year at $4 each, or $8,000. If that distributor can now get the same discounts S&S gets, a 5% cut would save $400 a year. That figure is an assumption, not an FTC number. A 30-person cleaning company buying uniforms is a purchaser, not a reseller, so it is unlikely to see any direct effect. Who should care: firms that resell goods and compete with larger buyers, including promo-merch agencies and contractors who resell parts and fixtures. Everyone else can ignore this.