The European Union approved tariffs to hit around €21 billion ($23.2 billion) of US goods in retaliation for the 25% duties President Donald Trump imposed last month on the bloc’s steel and aluminum exports.

A majority of the EU’s 27 member states on Wednesday voted in favor of the penalties, some of which will start taking effect in mid-April. The tariffs will target politically sensitive American states and include products such as soybeans from Louisiana, home to House Speaker Mike Johnson, as well as diamonds, agricultural products, poultry and motorcycles.    

The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, said in a statement that the countermeasures can be suspended at any time “should the US agree to a fair and balanced negotiated outcome.”

The move adds to the growing transatlantic trade war, with the US also having applied a universal 20% tariff on nearly all European exports as well as a separate 25% duty on cars and some auto parts. Trump has said he’ll announce additional tariffs on lumber, semiconductor chips and pharmaceutical products. All of Trump’s new tariffs are hitting around €380 billion of EU goods.

Some of the EU tariffs will take effect on April 15, while another list will be imposed mid-May and a third will start on Dec. 1, Bloomberg reported earlier. Most of the targeted goods face a 25% tariff level, with a few categories set to face 10% levies. 

Bourbon was removed from the bloc’s list amid pressure from member states after Trump threatened 200% duties on wine, champagne and other alcoholic beverages from France and elsewhere. 

Trump has repeatedly attacked the EU, the US’s largest trading partner, saying it was formed to “screw” the US and that the bloc’s trade-in-goods surplus is evidence of an unfair relationship. The EU’s trade weighted average tariff rate was 2.7% in 2023, according to World Trade Organization data. 

“They come up with rules and regulations that are just designed for one reason: that you can’t sell your product in those countries,” Trump said earlier this week. “And we’re not going to let that happen.”

The EU’s trade chief, Maros Sefcovic, discussed parameters of possible engagement on trade issues with his American counterparts late Tuesday, according a commission spokesperson. Talks have so far yielded little progress and US officials don’t appear to yet have a clear negotiating mandate from Trump, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The bloc’s executive arm is working on a “term sheet” of potential areas for negotiation, including lower tariffs, regulations and standards, Bloomberg previously reported.

Wednesday’s vote underscored the unity in EU capitals in the face of Trump’s escalating trade dispute. The American measures threaten to wipe out much of the euro-area expansion the European Central Bank forecasts for this year and next.

In addition, the commission, which handles trade matters for the bloc, is preparing a set of countermeasures to retaliate against the so-called reciprocal tariffs that went into effect Wednesday. The commission is planning to announce its plans early next week and then begin consultations with member states, a spokesperson said. 

The universal tariffs are meant to target all the trade barriers US exports face abroad, such as duties, domestic regulations and taxes, including the value-added tax. Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen has previously said the EU “holds a lot of cards,” including retaliatory tariffs and targeting American services and technology companies.

France, Germany and other countries have called on the commission to consider deploying the bloc’s anti-coercion instrument — the EU’s most powerful trade tool, designed to strike back against nations that use trade and economic measures coercively, Bloomberg reported earlier. 

The bloc still wants to find a negotiated solution to the tariff dispute but so far it has failed to engage in meaningful negotiations with the US administration. 

For the EU, the fight over American metals tariffs started in 2018 during Trump’s first term, when the US hit nearly $7 billion of European steel and aluminum exports with duties, citing national security concerns. At the time, officials in Brussels scoffed at the notion that the EU posed such a threat.

In that first salvo, the US hit steel goods with 25% tariffs and aluminum with 10%, and included exemptions for certain products.  

The 27-nation bloc reacted by targeting politically sensitive companies with retaliatory duties, including Harley-Davidson Inc. motorcycles and Levi Strauss & Co. jeans. The measures were applied product-by-product and included agricultural goods and apparel in addition to steel and aluminum products. 

The two sides agreed to a temporary truce in 2021, when the US partly removed its measures and introduced a set of tariff-rate quotas above which duties on the metals are applied, while the EU froze all of its restrictive measures.

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Good morning! Trump administration fires another woman from top military role, Mira Murati adds advisors to new venture, and women’s college basketball closes out its last season before a major change.

– Off the court. After UConn won the NCAA women’s college basketball championship on Sunday, coach Geno Auriemma weighed in on a huge change barreling toward women’s college basketball and the entire NCAA. Colleges are expected to soon be able to pay players—and that ability “will ruin parity,” Auriemma said on Sunday.

He was referring to parity in tournaments; when one basketball program pays more than the other, on-court advantage goes beyond traditional powerhouses like UConn. “[When] it’s money-driven, it’s going to be, who is going to become the Dodgers and Yankees?” the coach said.

On Monday, Judge Claudia Wilken sat down to approve a settlement that will decide how those questions are answered. House v. NCAA is a landmark settlement of three different antitrust cases in college sports. The settlement would allow schools to pay athletes $20.5 million each in revenue-sharing next year, and $2.8 billion would go toward back pay for athletes who played before name, image, likeness rules were reformed, which allowed students to earn money from their brands without losing NCAA status.

Wilken didn’t approve the settlement on Monday; she said she’s seeking to resolve some remaining issues before signing off. Some athletes testified against the agreement on Monday; NIL superstar Livvy Dunne said the formula it uses to calculate NIL value placed hers too low. Smaller schools object that it will leave them behind and limit the development of athletes for less prominent, non-revenue generating but sometimes Olympic sports.

Earlier this year, I chatted with Sedona Prince, a lead plaintiff on the case. She is in favor of athletes being paid directly by their universities, in addition to NIL earnings. “It’s two different things, right?” she says. The 24-year-old suffered serious injuries during her college career at Texas Christian University; her time in college basketball just ended with a loss in the Elite Eight. The experience caused her to rethink how college sports operate. “My mom had been talking to other parents of kids who had been going through these injuries and had been paying their own medical bills,” she says. “It just outraged us as a family.” She wanted to sue her school, and ended up joining this lawsuit. She sat through a “brutal” seven-hour deposition and her lawyers have been logged into her social media accounts for years, she says, to view any messages related to college earnings. She gained more attention, too, when she posted a video about the drastic disparity between the men’s and women’s weight rooms during the NCAA tournament, igniting a debate about gender equity in college sports.

While the debate around the House settlement comes down to a few highly impactful details—exactly how much athletes should be paid, what the end of amateurism will mean across the entire NCAA—Prince stands firm on her main point. “We’re adults,” she says. “There are 18- to 22-year-olds working 9-to-5s.” She’s excited the settlement could give a boost to athletes who didn’t get to benefit from the NIL era. “We’re not done,” she says.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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Good morning!

HR leaders are typically the ones to manage return-to-office policies. But just because they’re enforcing them, doesn’t mean they believe that they’re best for workers.

56% of HR leaders say they’re being pressured by CEOs to mandate in-office work arrangements, according to a new report of 1,000 human resource leaders from people-focused software platform Leapsome. However, 70% believe that collaboration can be just as effective out of the office and 79% say allowing employees to choose their work environment is best for productivity.

“During COVID we all learned that remote works, and that it helps people, and in fact, employees ask for it,” says Luck Dookchitra, VP of people and culture at Leapsome. “So there is a unique tension that arises, especially if [an RTO] policy is driven solely by leadership.”

Ensuring that HR leaders are able to manage CEO expectations while keeping their people happy certainly isn’t an easy task. However, Dookchitra says it helps if HR leaders can get to the root of why executives are so keen on getting workers back into the office, and share that sentiment in a way employees can relate to. She says that explaining the “why” behind such a directive is just as important as explaining the “how.”

“Even if you’re against it personally, you need to find a reason why,” says Dookchitra. “I think why it feels so stressful for HR leaders because they’re not providing a reason, many of them are just putting out a directive, and hoping for the best, which often doesn’t go well.” 

Dookchitra advises that when CHROs approach CEOs about RTO policies, they must be prepared, especially if they’re taking the opposing side. That means having data and insights from their own organization to see how policy changes are affecting the company on a larger scale. 

“Most of the time you don’t have an option, you have to agree and commit,” says Dookchitra. “So it’s really important to put forward the data, insights from your own organization, on employee sentiment and candidate feedback; so at the end of the day you have what you need to make your point, whether or not it’s going to go your way.”

Brit Morse
brit.morse@fortune.com

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