labor practices

Starting today, many fast-food workers in California will be paid $20 an hour under a new minimum-wage law. It’s time for a Kimberly rant! We’ll get into the subsidization of low-wage work, the reals costs behind all the stuff we buy — from burgers to clothes — and who’s picking up the tab. Plus, guest host Reema Khrais reminisces about the early years of Google as the company celebrates 20 years of Gmail.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

• • “Fast fashion retailer Shein doubles profits as it awaits IPO approval” from The Guardian

• • “California’s Fast-Food Workers Just Got a Pay Bump” from The New York Times

• • “California’s Crazy ‘Fast Food’ Minimum Wage Takes Effect” from The Wall Street Journal

• • “Your hair looks gorgeous. It cost … what?!” from The Washington Post

• • “Hey, Gen X, Z and millennials: the great wealth transfer could go to health care, not you” from USA Today

• • “Ancient giant dolphin discovered in the Amazon” from CNN

• • “Gmail revolutionized email 20 years ago. People thought it was Google’s April Fools’ Day joke” from The Associated Press

We love to hear from you. Send your questions and comments to makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.

It can be easy to overlook the people behind all the technology we use. But a startup based in India called Karya is putting them front and center, both in its method and its marketing. The company’s stated goal is to alleviate poverty for Indians living in low-income communities by paying them approximately $5 per hour, a wage that’s higher than the market rate, to create data. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Vivek Seshadri, Karya’s chief technology officer and co-founder, about how his company fits into the lucrative data collection business.

This week, The Daily is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and checking in on what has happened in the time since they first ran.

This year, we explored the story of Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer, two Amazon workers at a warehouse in New York City, who had embarked on an improbable attempt to create the company’s first union and succeeded.

Today, we return to their story and learn about the current state of their organizing effort.

Guest: Jodi Kantor, an investigative reporter for The New York Times; and Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer, warehouse workers who led the first successful unionization attempt at Amazon.

Background reading

• Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer won the first successful unionization effort at any Amazon warehouse in the United States, one of the most significant labor victories in a generation.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

It's not been a great week for big business? Sir Philip Green and the bosses at BHS have seen even greater criticism and Sports Direct's Mike Ashley was hauled in front of MPs.

So is our modern of big business capitalism going badly wrong?

Have we built an economy where it's low pay and bad conditions for the workers but huge rewards for the bosses?

Do we need to worry about inequality?

Simon Lambert and Rachel Rickard Straus, of This is Money, join Georgie Frost, of Share Radio, in the studio to tackle those thorny questions - and try to find some good news and put a smile on your face along the way.

In that good news corner comes a victory for borrowers over a bank that ripped up the tracker mortgage rule book and a reader who wants to know if they've struck it lucky with a rare 50p.

Listen to the show, leave us a comment and please rate it and share it if you like it.