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It’s been a good week for employees of Chobani. They learned that they could eventually own about 10 percent of the rapidly expanding Greek yogurt company. That could potentially make millionaires of some workers, if the privately held company is sold or goes public.

It’s a grand gesture, and reflects a rising trend in employee ownership.

Chobani’s meteoric rise began in a defunct old Kraft yogurt manufacturing plant in upstate New York. Founder Hamdi Ulukaya’s only experience in the dairy business was that his mother made delicious strained yogurt in his hometown in Turkey.

Now, a decade later, the company has reached $1 billion in annual sales. It has two factories, 2,000 employees and is worth an estimated $3 billion.

Ulukaya — still Chobani’s majority owner — told employees on Tuesday to think of the grants as a pledge to expand the company even more.

“We used to work together; now we are partners,” he told workers at the company’s facility in New Berlin, N.Y.

Ulukaya is outspoken about corporate civic duty. Ten percent of Chobani profits go to charity. One-third of its workforce is made up of refugees. And an employee ownership grant was always part of Ulukaya’s dream plan.

Still, his announcement came as a surprise to almost all employees.

“We built something; now we’re sharing it,” Ulukaya said.

Employee stock ownership is not all that unusual, especially among technology firms. Food companies like Starbucks and Whole Foods offer stock grants.

Corey Rosen, of the National Center for Employee Ownership, says employee ownership takes many different forms, and in a growing number of companies, workers own the firms outright.

Dairy company Schreiber Foods, for example, is larger than Chobani and is 100 percent employee-owned through an employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP.

Rosen says such plans allow employees to own, control and share in the profits of a company through a trust. Their popularity is increasing, he says, in part because they enjoy large tax benefits and because retiring baby boomers who own companies see it as a good way to transfer ownership. He estimates nearly one-tenth of American workers are part of an ESOP.

“This has kind of been an under-the-radar change in the American economy that’s really very significant,” Rosen says.

He says when employee ownership is distributed throughout the rank and file, whether through an ESOP or a stock grant program, it has powerful impact on worker culture. Rosen claims company performance improves after they start employee ownership programs, and workers build wealth much, much faster.

“We hear all this discussion these days about economic inequality, and the wage system is really not going to solve that problem very well,” Rosen says. “Even if you raise the minimum wage, it’s only going to affect a small minority of the workforce.”

Michael Gonda, a Chobani spokesman and longtime employee, says granting everyone a piece of Chobani was important to Ulukaya.

“One of the hardest things to do for a program like this, is when you have 2,000 employees that you want to participate in it, is figuring out that allocation,” Gonda says. “Obviously, time and role at the company have a huge part to play, but this is a very personal part of the process for Hamdi, and he spent a lot of time going through that.”

The company didn’t disclose details about the allocations, but the longest-serving employees received the largest shares.

Gonda says there was a lot of hugging and crying at the announcement ceremony.

“There’s a very emotional bond and an emotional connection that you don’t typically associate with a manufacturing facility, or a yogurt plant,” he says.

Now that bond includes a joint financial stake in the future performance of the company.

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The FBI has officially decided it can’t tell Apple how the agency hacked into the locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers.

The FBI paid undisclosed professional hackers more than $1 million to get inside the locked and encrypted iPhone 5C through a previously unknown flaw in the software.

The agency has been weighing whether it would submit the details to a review process that helps decide whether software vulnerabilities known to the government should be disclosed to companies.

FBI science and technology chief Amy Hess said in a statement on Wednesday that the agency has determined it won’t be able to submit the third-party iPhone hack to the review, called the Vulnerabilities Equities Process:

“The VEP cannot perform its function without sufficient detail about the nature and extent of a vulnerability.

“The FBI purchased the method from an outside party so that we could unlock the San Bernardino device. We did not, however, purchase the rights to technical details about how the method functions, or the nature and extent of any vulnerability upon which the method may rely in order to operate. As a result, currently we do not have enough technical information about any vulnerability that would permit any meaningful review under the VEP process.”

This was exactly the kind of challenge predicted by Robert Knake, former director of cybersecurity policy for the National Security Council in the Obama administration, in his recent interview with NPR. Knake offered a detailed description of how the Vulnerabilities Equities Process works and suggested that intellectual property lawyers will in the future fight over whether hackers can own the rights to a vulnerability.

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This post was updated at 7:45 p.m. ET.

A central neighborhood in Boston had been left out of Amazon’s plans for free same-day delivery in the city. The company said on Tuesday that will change.

A Bloomberg analysis last week showed that the predominantly black Roxbury community did not have access to the Amazon Prime service, which is offered to all adjacent neighborhoods. After looking at nationwide data, Bloomberg called the disparity in Boston “the most striking.”

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, who had criticized the inconsistency, tweeted on Tuesday that Amazon had notified him of the change. “I thank them for this decision,” he wrote.

In a statement to The Boston Globe, the mayor’s office said the city’s chief of economic development and chief of policy “had been in conversations with Amazon before the mayor’s call.”

Amazon says it is “actively working with our local carrier to enable service to the Roxbury neighborhood in the coming weeks.” The statement from Scott Stanzel, director Amazon’s operations communications, adds that the company is not done expanding same-day delivery nationwide and that all Prime members already have free two-day and one-day shipping options.

In its report last week, Bloomberg noted that there was “no evidence that Amazon makes decisions on where to deliver based on race.”

“Demographics play no role in it. Zero,” Amazon’s vice president of global communications, Craig Berman, told the news agency. Berman said that those decisions were instead based on where existing Amazon Prime customers live.

The Boston Globe‘s own analysis indicated that “the three ZIP codes excluded from same-day delivery by Amazon are among the poorest in Boston.”

The service is available only to monthly subscribers of Amazon Prime. Those customers can get free same-day delivery on orders of at least $35.

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Quirtina Crittenden was struggling to get a room on Airbnb. She would send a request to a host. Wait. And then get declined.

“The hosts would always come up with excuses like, ‘oh, someone actually just booked it’ or ‘oh, some of my regulars are coming in town, and they’re going to stay there,'” Crittenden said. “But I got suspicious when I would check back like days later and see that those dates were still available.”

In many ways Crittenden, 23, is the target audience for AirBnb. She’s young, likes to travel, and has a good paying job as a business consultant in Chicago. So she started to wonder if it had something to do with her race. Crittenden is African American, and on AirBnb, both hosts and guests are required to have their names and photos prominently displayed on their profiles.

Crittenden shared her frustrations on Twitter with the hashtag #AirbnbWhileBlack. She started hearing from lots of friends who had similar experiences.

“The most common response I got was, ‘oh yeah, that’s why I don’t use my photo.’ Like duh. Like I was the late one,” Crittenden said.

So she ran her own experiment—she shortened her name to just “Tina” and changed her photo to a picture of a landscape.

“Ever since I changed my name and my photo, I’ve never had any issues on Airbnb,” Crittenden said.

Crittenden’s story fits within a larger finding that racial discrimination on AirBnb is widespread. Michael Luca and his colleagues Benjamin Edelman and Dan Svirsky at Harvard Business School recently ran an experiment on AirBnb. They sent out 6,400 requests to real AirBnb hosts in five major American cities—Baltimore, Dallas, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Washington.

All the requests were exactly the same except for the names they gave their make-believe travelers. Some had African American-sounding names like Jamal or Tanisha and others had stereotypically white-sounding names like Meredith or Todd.

Luca and his colleagues found requests with African American sounding names were roughly 16 percent less likely to be accepted than their white-sounding counterparts. They found discrimination across the board: among cheap listings and expensive listings, in diverse neighborhoods and homogenous neighborhoods, and with novice hosts as well as experienced hosts. They also found that black hosts were also less likely to accept requests from guests with African American-sounding names than with white-sounding ones.

Luca and his colleagues found hosts pay a price for their bias—when hosts rejected a black guest, they only found a replacement about a third of the time. In a separate study, Luca and his colleagues have found that guests discriminate, too, and black hosts earn less money on their properties on Airbnb.

To put this in perspective, AirBnb isn’t some little startup anymore. It’s one of the largest players in the hotel industry worldwide. In 2015, more than 2 million listings were offered on the platform, nearly four times as many rooms as the Marriott hotel chain.

Luca thinks this racial discrepancy is driven largely by unconscious bias—the hidden associations we have that affect our behavior without us realizing it. The way AirBnb’s platform is designed, names and photos are the first thing people see, and therefore one of the first things they consider, either consciously or unconsciously, when choosing a place to stay.

David King, AirBnb’s new director of “diversity and belonging,” says AirBnb is aware of discrimination on their platform and they want to be a leader in addressing it. He says he’s talking with Luca and others in finding potential solutions.

One thing that could help is removing people’s names and photos or making them less prominent. But this isn’t something AirBnb will improve their platform.

“The photos are on the platform for a reason,” King said. “It really does help to aid in the trust between the guest and the host . . . You want to make sure that the guest who shows up at your door is the person you’ve been communicating with.”

King pointed out that Airbnb has the opportunity to do a lot of good in communities. It brings tourists to neighborhoods without many hotels that don’t normally benefit from the tourism industry.

One of those neighborhoods is Washington, D.C.’s Anacostia. It’s a predominantly black neighborhood on the edge of the city, across the Anacostia River from the main tourist attractions. While there are only a couple hotels here, there are dozens of Airbnb hosts.

Synta Keeling is one. She earns thousands of dollars a month renting out two bedrooms in her townhouse, but she puts in a lot of work. She’s earned the official designation of “superhost” for getting excellent reviews and never cancelling a booking. It’s a title she says hosts in richer areas of the city don’t have to worry about.

Social scientists have uncovered racial bias in all different places online. Shankar talked with psychologist Raj Ghoshal, who’s found racial discrimination on Craigslist. Mikki Hebl, a psychologist at Rice University, has found racial bias on Facebook.

What’s unclear is what legal liability websites might have for discrimination on their platforms. So while online platforms offer us the opportunity to meet people we would never normally meet, our hidden biases may be getting in the way.

The Hidden Brain Podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Kara McGuirk-Alison, Maggie Penman and Max Nesterak. To subscribe to our newsletter, click here. You can also follow us on Twitter@hiddenbrain, @karamcguirk,@maggiepenman and@maxnesterak, and listen for Hidden Brain stories every week on your local public radio station.

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Meet Liam, an Apple robot designed to take apart 1.2 million iPhones a year.

Mashable reporter Samantha Murphy Kelly got a first look at the robot at Apple’s headquarters. It has 29 arms and it was an Apple secret for three years. She writes:

“Liam is programmed to carefully disassemble the many pieces of returned iPhones, such as SIM card trays, screws, batteries and cameras, by removing components bit by bit so they’ll all be easier to recycle. Traditional tech recycling methods involve a shredder with magnets that makes it hard to separate parts in a pure way (you’ll often get scrap materials commingled with other pieces).”

According to Apple’s environmental report released last week, Liam’s goal is to pick out all the high-quality, reusable components from old iPhones to reduce the need for mining more resources from earth.

While the technology currently only exists in Apple’s factories in California and the Netherlands, it’s the company’s experiment in recycling technology — a field that is gradually attracting the interest of technology and robotics entrepreneurs.

We just might end up in a world reminiscent of the 2008 Disney and Pixar movie WALL-E.

Sorting Through Chemicals In E-Waste

When trash is sorted for recycling by hand, the job can be dangerous. According to a report published last year by the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health and other organizations, 17 people died between 2011 and 2013 on their jobs at recycling facilities in the United States due to unsafe working conditions.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration lists all the hazards workers can be exposed to when sorting out waste, ranging from chemical exposure to lifting injuries. Electronic waste, in particular, exposes workers to multiple chemicals that may harm their health, including ammonia, mercury and asbestos.

According to the Apple’s recent environmental report, the company has collected nearly 90 million pounds of e-waste through its recycling programs, which is 71 percent of the total weight of the products it sold seven years earlier.

But Fortune editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt wrote that Liam the robot wouldn’t scale up because Apple sold more than 230 million iPhones last year. He writes:

“One Liam is not going to make much of a dent in the toxic mountain of electronics waste Apple has helped create.”

While Apple told Mashable’s Kelly that no other company it knows of is disassembling technology products in this way, there are many interesting “recycling robots” like Liam out there, although most are still just prototypes — except for ZenRobotics, a company from Finland.

Using Smart Software To Sort Trash

The ZenRobotics Recycler utilizes artificial intelligence to identify and sort materials from mixed waste. Show samples of materials to the system, and the software will learn what to do with it. According to its website, the company has the “first commercially available robotic waste sorting system.” This month, it announced plans to deliver its first robots to the U.S.

Dane Campbell, a systems engineer with PLEXUS Recycling Technologies, the company that brought ZenRobotics into the United States, says robotics in the waste industry in the U.S. is not the new idea — but artificial intelligence is.

He says current machines sometimes have problems sorting out materials like plastic bags from newspapers, thus causing sorting facilities to rely on people. According to Campbell, the machines can cost up to $1 million each.

Recycling may become more expensive — a New York Times opinion article pointed out last October — as more materials are thrown into the recycling dump, sorting will take more supervision. But automation remains expensive. The falling commodity prices might also hurt the recycling business.

A U.S. startup, AMP Robotics, aims to change that by offering “scalable recycling.” The company is fairly new, and founder Matanya Horowitz says he had the idea to bring robotics to the recycling industry because conditions for recycling workers can be “dull, dirty and dangerous.” He says “recycling is ripe for this technology.”

The company sold one machine last month and is still looking to improve the system. According to Horowitz, the machine will work like those found in a food processing plant.

Roaming Robots To Encourage Recycling Behavior

Some more future-looking solutions to encourage recycling might lie with robots that encourage you to throw your trash into bins.

For a time in Disney World, a talking trash can called Push roamed the streets of the theme park, encouraging people to discard trash in it while cracking jokes at passers-by. It’s no longer there after the contract expired in 2014.

A few years ago, the Dustbot, a Segway-robot hybrid roamed the streets of Italy, collecting trash when called. The project ended in 2009.

As robotics and technology like artificial intelligence matures, we just might see more of these robots hiding behind sorting facilities or roaming the streets — especially because we’re accumulating more and more waste globally and in the U.S.

Zhai Yun Tan is a digital news intern.

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In this year’s election cycle, international trade has emerged as a top campaign issue.

So journalists with NPR and several public-radio member stations set out this week to examine trade matters as part of our special election-year series: A Nation Engaged.

We journalists learned a lot about what Americans are saying about trade. You can join in the learning process and conversation on this page, where we’ve pulled together the stories and interviews.

If you don’t have time to dive into all of it, here are some of the comments that helped us tell stories about the good and bad impacts of trade.

• Mike John, Missouri cattle rancher: “This pending TPP trade negotiation, to me, is hugely important for agricultural commodities, but specifically for beef. … The Asian markets are showing a huge increase in demand for beef.”
• Dennis Roach, truck driver: “Jobs are going to foreign countries, we’re shipping more products in from overseas. … I bet you go to anybody’s house and look in their closet and it says: Indonesia, China, Japan, Taiwan. Very few things are made in the USA.”
• Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper: “Commerce between two countries, throughout history, has always, has almost always, led to improving quality of life on both sides.”
• David Autor, MIT labor economist: “If I lose my job at a furniture factory where I’ve worked for decades, no amount of cheaper toys and raincoats at Wal-Mart is going to make me whole again.”
• Congressional Research Service: “NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters. The net overall effect of NAFTA on the U.S. economy appears to have been relatively modest.”
• Ron Kirk, former U.S. trade representative and former Dallas mayor: “No state benefits more from global trade and global commerce than the state of Texas. In Texas, we lead the country in exports and no other states are close — we export just shy of $300 billion of goods and products and services. … There are literally thousands of Texans who owe their livelihoods to the production and movement of goods to consumers around the world.”
• John Hansen, Nebraska Farmers Union president and opponent of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement: “We have a more positive balance of trade with countries that we do not have a trade agreement with. We’d be better off if we did nothing than we did something that’s destructive.”

Listen to the audio above for a discussion of trade in the political season with NPR’s Michel Martin, NPR’s Marilyn Geewax and Colorado Public Radio’s Megan Verlee.

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Following a national nomination process, the Bank of England has announced the new face of the £20 bill: famed painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), known for his landscapes, seascapes and innovative depiction of light.

Turner will replace economist Adam Smith, the influential advocate of free market policies who came up with the notion of the “invisible hand.”

After deciding that the figure on the bill would be from the visual arts field, the U.K. got the public involved by seeking nominations. The Bank of England says it received “29,701 nominations covering 590 eligible characters,” and the bank’s governor made the final decision.

“There were lots of very well-known names, but also I discovered artists I’d never heard of and their great contribution. … So the real thing that surprised me was the sheer breadth of talent,” Bank of England Chief Cashier Victoria Cleland said in a video about the decision.

The Bank of England has published a concept illustration of the new bill, which it says will enter circulation by 2020:

Art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon said Turner “is to British art what Darwin is to British science or Churchill is to British politics.” Here’s more from Graham-Dixon:

“He is, I think, without doubt, the single most original British artist of all time – the one who’s had the greatest influence on the art of Europe and indeed, the world. His breakthroughs, his obsession with the depiction of light, was a huge catalyst for that minor French movement known as Impressionism.”

In addition to a Turner self-portrait, the note will feature his painting The Fighting Temeraire and a quote from him: “Light is therefore colour.”

Other possible candidates included actor Charlie Chaplin, artist Barbara Hepworth, potter Josiah Wedgwood, film director Alfred Hitchcock and artist William Hogarth.

As NPR reported, the Bank of England announced in 2013 that Jane Austen will replace Charles Darwin on the £10 bill.

The BBC noted that “of the five characters on banknotes by 2020, other than the Queen only Jane Austen – appearing on the £10 note from 2017 – is a woman.”

Earlier this week, the U.S. Treasury announced plans to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on its $20 bill.

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Uber drivers will stay independent contractors, not employees, in California and Massachusetts, just as the ride-booking company had maintained they were. Uber is settling class action lawsuits by drivers in the two states for a maximum of $100 million.

In a statement, the company says it will pay the plaintiffs $84 million, plus another $16 million if Uber goes public and within a year increases in value by one and a half times over its worth in December.

The deal allows Uber to keep labor costs low because it doesn’t have to pay independent workers the same kind of wages, expenses and benefits as employees.

In a claim last year brought by an Uber driver, the California Labor Commissioner ruled the driver was an employee. Although the commissioner’s ruling was specific to the claim and not precedent-setting, it gave plaintiffs some ammunition and Uber more incentive to negotiate. Still, Uber has been able to keep this aspect of its business model in place.

Uber board member David Plouffe, talking with All Things Considered in November, said the drivers like being independents:

“I think if you talk to the vast, vast majority of Uber drivers, they like the classification because it gives them maximum flexibility not just day-to-day and hour-to-hour, but they can sign up and do this for three months when they’re home from school or when they’ve lost some hours. And then if they decide to stop doing it, they can stop doing it. So we’re very confident in the legal case. We don’t control schedule. We don’t control hours. There’s no set route. There’s no set uniform. So we’re very confident in our business model.”

NPR’s Laura Sydell reported last year on the downside for drivers:

“Shannon Liss-Riordan, an attorney for the drivers, said Uber passes on a lot of costs.

“‘They have to pay for their own cars. They have to pay for their gas. They have to pay for the wear and tear on their vehicles. And basically Uber is able to shift all those expenses to its drivers and not have to pay it themselves,’ she says.”

Laura also noted the case has wider ramifications:

“Any ruling in this case could affect other companies in the sharing economy, like Airbnb, TaskRabbit and Lyft, an Uber competitor, says Stanford law professor Bill Gould.

“The sharing sector is ‘where this question of misclassification of employees into independent contractor status is arising with increasing frequency,’ he says.”

Announcing the settlement, Liss-Riordan said in addition to the money, the deal gives drivers some security:

“Uber will no longer be able to deactivate drivers at will. Instead, drivers may only be terminated for sufficient cause. And drivers will receive warnings in most instances and thus opportunity to correct any issues prior to deactivation … and drivers will not be subject to deactivation for low acceptance rates.”

In addition, she says, Uber and the drivers will have a formal grievance procedure. And drivers will have the right to post signs in their cars telling customers that they are free to tip the drivers.

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