Business Daily

What happens when a company lets its employees decide what their salaries should be? Will anyone ask to be paid less?

A number of tech companies are finding out, as they see it as a way of achieving greater fairness and transparency, as well as motivating staff to raise their effort to match their remuneration. Ed Butler speaks to Heather McGregor, executive dean of the Edinburgh Business School, and to David Burkus, the California-based author of a book about pay transparency, Under New Management.

(Picture: Woman covering face with fan of dollar bills looking at camera on yellow background; Credit: SIphotography/Getty Images)

Why one financier is the target of a global conspiracy theory. Manuela Saragosa speaks to the BBC's Mike Rudin, who made a recent documentary on the Soros conspiracy, and to Joe Uscinski, associate professor of political science at the University of Miami - and an expert in conspiracy theories. And the BBC's Dhruti Shah speaks to David Mikkelson, the founder of Snopes, the company trying to debunk fake news for the last 25 years.

(Photo: Anti-Soros placards during a political demonstration is Macedonia in 2017, Credit: Getty Images)

Truck drivers and the robots that could replace them. Jahd Khalil visits a truck stop in the US state of Virginia to find out why there's a chronic shortage of truckers in the US. Robert Brown from the robotics company TuSimple and Greg Hastings, associate partner at McKinsey & Co, tell Manuela Saragosa why long-distance driving is exactly the kind of job suited to robots.

(Photo: A truck stop on the US-Mexico border, Credit: Getty Images)

Why is it so hard to fix your own things? Ed Butler speaks to those campaigning for manufacturers to make it easier for us to fix our electronics goods - everything from tractors to smartphones. Clare Seek runs a Repair Café in Portsmouth, England, a specially designated venue for anyone who wants to get their stuff to last longer. And Ed travels to Agbogbloshie in Accra in Ghana, one of the places where our mountains of e-waste end up being pulled apart and melted down for scrap. The programme also features interviews with Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association; Kyle Wiens, founder of iFixit; intellectual property lawyer Jani Ihalainen; and Susanne Baker, head of environment and compliance at techUK.

(Photo: Broken iPhones, Credit: Getty Images)

Modern textiles are environmentally problematic. Cotton needs gallons of water to produce, while polyester comes from crude oil. So could organic materials such as mushrooms and banana leaves hold the answer?

Manuela Saragosa speaks to Dr Richard Blackburn, chemistry professor at Leeds University, who has been studying the ecological impact of the garments industry for decades. Meanwhile the BBC's Elizabeth Hotson investigates innovative new fabrics preparing to hit the market, including MycoTEX, a material made from fungal mycelium, developed by Aniela Hoitink.

(Picture: Branch of ripe cotton; Credit: Gargonia/Getty Images)

Is the rapid build up of consumer and corporate credit a threat to China's economic wellbeing?

On the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, Ed Butler asks whether the increasing dependence on debt of this officially communist nation is becoming a problem.

The programme includes interviews with Shanghai-based journalist Liyan Ma, Shaun Rein of business strategy consultants China Market Research Group, and economist Linda Yueh.

(Picture: People's Liberation Army personnel participate in a military parade at Tiananmen Square in Beijing to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China; Credit: Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images)

Some traders are betting on the UK crashing out of the EU without a divorce agreement. Should we be concerned that they wield too much political influence?

Both the British Prime Minister's sister Rachel Johnson, and the former Conservative finance minister Philip Hammond, have publicly voiced concerns in recent day that Boris Johnson is backed by financiers speculating on a sharp fall in the pound following a possible no-deal Brexit on 31 October.

Manuela Saragosa asks how credible are such claims? How are the markets positioned for Brexit? And is there any way of even knowing who is "shorting" the pound, ready to profit from an unexpected fall in its value?

The programme includes interviews with David Riley, chief investment strategist at Bluebay Asset Management, and with Jane Foley, head of currency strategy at Rabobank. Plus the BBC's Edwin Lane learns how to play the foreign exchange markets from Piers Curran of Amplify Trading.

Producer: Laurence Knight

(Picture: A woman looks at a chart showing the drop in the pound against the dollar after the UK vote to leave the EU in 2016; Credit: Daniel Sorabji/AFP/Getty Images)

How WeWork's Adam Neumann lost his job after a disastrous attempt to list the company on the stock market. Manuela Saragosa speaks to the Wall Street Journal's Eliot Brown about the charisma of Adam Neumann and how it helped raise billions from investors, and to Andre Spicer from the Cass Business School about the cult of the founder-CEO. Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, explains why WeWork's IPO failure should be a lesson to the markets.

(Photo: Adam Neumann, Credit: Getty Images)

Ed Butler speaks to Professor Tom Crowther from the Swiss university ETH Zurich, who says planting billions of trees around the world is by far the biggest and cheapest way to tackle climate change. Marcelo Guimaraes, chairman of Mahogany Roraima, a commercial timber and reforestation plantation in the northern Amazon rainforest, discusses how that would work in practice.

(Photo: A tree in a deforested area of the Amazon rainforest, Credit: Getty Images)

What is our ethical duty to eliminate carbon emissions? Was Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg right to express such anger at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York this week?

Justin Rowlatt asks leading moral philosopher Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, whether someone driving a petrol- fuelled car can really be held responsible for increasing the risk of drought in Africa. And why should we give up taking long-haul flights, if the tiny amount of carbon emissions that saves will make practically no difference in the grand scheme of things?

Plus climatologist Emily Shuckburgh explains why she is not despondent about climate change - despite seeing the effects first-hand on polar research trips - and how a new institute she is heading at Cambridge University is generating a lot of excitement among academics.

Producer: Laurence Knight

(Picture: Dead cow in drought-struck Kenya; Credit: muendo/Getty Images)