Marketplace - Want a raise? You might have to find a new job

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

You know how wages have, on average, stagnated when you account for inflation? Well there’s one group that saw some actual wage growth last month: Job changers. Pay growth for people who switched jobs was 7% in July, according to ADP. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the entire labor market is heating up — some in-demand labor sectors might be accounting for most of that bump. Also in this episode: Gen Z bucks the K-shaped economy trend, insurance billing errors can add up for employers, and Kai visits a used EV auction.Every story has an economic angle. Want some in your inbox? Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter.Marketplace is more than a radio show. Check out our original reporting and financial literacy content at marketplace.org — and consider making an investment in our future.Read the stories in today’s episode:Job-changers are seeing their highest wage increases in nearly a yearGen Z is spending more across all income bracketsIn healthcare, catching errors from insurers is a growing industryThe entrepreneur building a marketplace for used EVs

There's jobs today and spending and health care. And, hey, want to buy a used EV? From American public media. This is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdahl. It is Wednesday, today the fifth day of August. Good as it always is to have you along, everybody. And honestly, all you all get to decide.

Either we are being incredibly consistent focusing on the labor market as we are this week, or we're slightly obsessed. I personally will own up to either choice because, first of all, jobs are basically the whole economic ballgame, but also because jobs is where the data is at this week. We'll get the July unemployment report on Friday. I think I've mentioned that a couple of times. Today, though, private payroll processor ADP offered us its data, which said companies added fewer jobs than expected in July, a relatively paltry 44,000.

But there was a nugget of good news for job changers. Pay growth for people who switched jobs in July was up 7% over the same month a year ago. Marketplaces Kristen Schwab gets us going. By now, the phrase economists used to describe the labor market is quite familiar. Low hire, low fire. And the longer that description is true, the more cautious people who have jobs become about looking for new ones. Nick Tremper is an economist at Gusto. If you're trying to hire somebody, you may be trying to take them from another job.

Convincing someone to leave their comfy, cozy, low-fire position for something new and unknown is especially tough right now. And that's going to increase the premium a little bit. They're taking a risk. And so you're going to have to up the pay. Now, the ADP report doesn't break down wage increases by industry, but a look at in-demand categories. where hiring is growing offers clues. Yelena Shuletjuva, an economist at the conference board, says there's a lot of poaching happening in healthcare and AI. Employers are still willing to pay a premium for workers they really want. It's why she thinks this wage jump for job changers is a bit isolated,

reserved for specific roles in industries and less of an across-market trend. I would just be very careful to interpret it as, if job market is heating up a game. But wages for job hoppers can be a predictor of where the overall labor market is heading down the road. Corey Staley is an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. You know, is maybe saying, hey, there's some potential either supply constraints or some potential demand picking up coming down the pipeline, right?

Like, it starts with the switchers, it starts with new hires. And someday could trickle down into the rest of the job market, including boosting wage. for people who stay at the same job. I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace. There's been much coverage here and elsewhere about a K-shaped economy, the idea that higher-income people bounced back from the pandemic and started spending money again much more easily and much more quickly than lower-income consumers did. One generation, though, isn't acting K-shaped really at all.

Data this week from Bank of America says the youngest adults among us, Gen Zers, that is, are actually all spending more across all income brackets. And not, by the way, on student loans and car payments. Think travel and jewelry and coffee. Marketplace's Kelly Wells is on that one. Gen Z came of age during and after COVID. So Matt Britton, who wrote the book Generation AI, says they're comfortable spending more of their income. Because people just stayed at home and bought stuff.

While they sat at home during the pandemic, Gen Z was also scrolling on social media. Looking at everybody else living their highlight real, And they think that they need to spend the money now. On top of that, Jen Ziers have adopted what Jason Dorsey calls the YOLO mentality. He leads a research firm called the Center for Generational Kinetics. They don't believe in a lot of the sort of traditional life promises such as retirement or even if Social Security is going to exist. And so they are choosing to spend now rather than save for things such as a house or others that might seem out of reach. The Bank of America report says instead they're indulging on small trips and con.

cosmetics and fun drinks. Economist Taylor Bowley, who wrote the report, calls this little treat spending. Being able to indulge yourself, even when things don't feel as attainable, is still very much alive. But despite the YOLO mentality and the rough entry-level job market, Gen Z is also the most optimistic. Corey Seamiller teaches at Wright State University and studies Gen Z. And she says part of that is just being young. But when you grow up in a recession, live through a pandemic, political turmoil is the norm. 2026 doesn't look so bad. There is no before for Gen Z.

So they only have now to really look at. And yeah, entry-level jobs are scarce, but young workers don't mind a drive-for-door-dash backup plan. They have the opportunity for additional income in their back pocket in a way the other generations might not see. C-Miller says just knowing that they could find a side hustle provides an emotional safety net that fuels that optimism and that spending. I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.

On Wall Street today, kind of a mixed bag, actually, not a whole lot of exuberance, irrational or otherwise. We will have the details when we do the numbers. I know I've mentioned this before, but it can't really be said too many times. Almost one out of every $5 in this entire economy, it's 18%, if you're looking for particulars, is spent on health care. So mistakes overpayments and money. double billing and things like that. They mean real money. And that's where what are called

payment integrity companies come in. The mistakes they find can save employers anywhere from five to 15 percent of their annual spending on health care. Alex Olgan has that story. It's a well-accepted fact that many medical bills have errors. Employers expect that the insurers they pay to run their health plan would catch this stuff. Turns out that's a bad assumption, says Joanne Hinton. She ran health benefits for the 12,000 Fort Worth employees, family members, and retirees in Texas until a few months ago. I think we were ignorant. It's kind of what you don't know that you don't know that you don't know. In 2017, Hinton found Etna, the city's insurer, double paid a $450,000 medical claim.

We were fighting them because why did you pay this twice and that's our money? Get it back. She wondered if there were other costly mistakes. Any dollar that we spend on health care is a dollar we are not spending on roads, traffic lights. Firefighters, parks. Etna says it's committed to accurately paying claims and protecting employer dollars, citing front-end controls and retrospective reviews and recovery. Hinton hired Smartlight analytics. The company combs through every health care bill and payment to find mistakes, and then gets the money back. Smartlight found about $3 million in errors, which is roughly 3% of the city's spending on health care.

In reality, what we're talking about is black and white issues that we for sure can get dollars back on. That's Asha George. She co-founded SmartLight in 2015. She used to work for insurers doing these checks. She says most claims are under $500. However, most carrier attention is focused on the expensive claims. And that means the majority of small dollar claims are just auto-paid and don't get reviewed. Inside a carrier, it's a small percentage. Almost all high dollar claims, over $20,000 will probably get some level of review. An insurance trade group confirmed all claims are run through automated accuracy and duplicate detection programs. Chris Deakin ran New Jersey's state health plan for about 800,000 people. She became the whistleblower in a case against Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield for overpaying medical claims. The insurer settled the case in 2025 and denied any wrongdoing. Now companies turn to Deakin to make sure their health plan is actually working in their best interest. Your assumption is they are going to be looking out for my dollar, my health care dollar.

And I think that that assumption is completely naive and completely wrong. Deacon says the problem goes. deeper than sloppy billing. Some insurers actually make money fixing their own mistakes. She describes a perverse incentive called shared savings, where insurers get a cut of the dollars they overpaid for a bill. If we pay the million dollars and then we figure out it should have only been 10, well, now I get to keep half of that because I found it on the back end. Deakin often recommends hiring an independent company like SmartLite or Claim Informatics to go through everything. They charge employers a flat fee to review claims.

Stephen Karaba is the CEO of Claim Informatics. We've recovered tens of millions of dollars for our clients, and we've saved our clients tens of millions of dollars at this juncture, but it's a drop of blood in the ocean. The U.S. spent $5.7 trillion on health care last year. It's not just employers that are scrutinizing payments. Hospitals now have so-called revenue integrity teams working the same angle, and insurers are selling services to check their own work. Karaba says it's turning into a competition.

The market is demanding third-party oversight because everyone has their hands in the cookie jar. McKinsey valued the payment integrity industry at $9 billion a few years ago and is expecting it to grow quickly as hospitals and insurers look for every dollar they can find and employers try to keep up. In Portland, I'm Alex Olgan for Marketplace. I should tell you on the way into this next story that I am an EV owner. Right as you walked in, I'm sure you probably noticed we have some chargers out front here. I did, and I was going to slide in there myself, but they're all full.

Yeah, sorry about that. A couple of those vehicles that are charging right now are actually for sale today in our daily auction. Which we will get to. We will. Jimmy Douglas is the CEO and founder of a company called Plug. It's an online marketplace built specifically for buying and selling used electric vehicles. I like my EV. I hope to drive it for a while.

But someday, me and the 5 million other Americans who've bought EVs in the past five years are going to get rid of them. And that is the market that Jimmy Douglas is betting on. We were in plugs offices in West Los Angeles last week before I caught this cold. Every conference room in the building is named after a landmark from the Fast and the Furious. This is probably not the time to tell you. I have not seen any film in that entire franchise. You know, that's okay. We have some TVs in here.

We can help you out. Wait, are there EVs in the Fast and Characys? There are not. You've got to work on that, man. Jimmy Douglas is a car guy from way back, worked at a Volkswagen dealership as a teenager before getting into tech. Eventually, he became head of sales and delivery operations at Tesla. He started his own company, this one, about three years ago.

All right, so this is where it all happens, clear. This is where it all happens. It's a bright open office space, about 30 people working in computers. What happens here is the buying and selling of roughly $3 million worth of used EVs every week. Plug buys them from people and from businesses, and then sells them within a day or two to a network of 700 dealers around the country in a live online auction. That auction happens every weekday, 3 a.m. to noon Pacific time. We got there about 1130. Let's walk over to the patio because it's beautiful today. All right, I'm game. Although we're coming back here to look at the auction

because that's cool. We should, yeah. We are going to take you through the auction's final minutes because the market for used EVs is heating up. Prices are up. Prices are up. Prices are up 7% year over year. That's according to Cox Automotive. And it's thanks in part to higher gas prices steering people away from combustion engine cars. Also, and meanwhile, the market for new EVs has slowed ever since Republicans ended Biden-era tax credits last year. EV used cars are not like used cars that we all know and love. Correct. Explain. Yeah. And it's becoming more and more true with every year that goes by. So Tesla was the first truly software-defined vehicle in the market in that it's a computer on wheels that happens to have a battery pack attached to it.

And at some point in time, the majority of mobility will be represented in this way where vehicles become AI-defined assets and software-defined assets, not just transportation. Right, right. So if you're talking about used EVs, which we are, how does that complicate things? Because there's a whole infrastructure out there that for 120 years has been selling used cars with internal combustion engines. And now you've got this new thing. Yeah, so I saw this when I was running Tesla's North America-wide used car business, which at the time was the largest used EV operation in the world. And what we saw was that there were two major factors. The first was that in order for a car dealership, which is really the foundation

of the used car industry, to actively participate in this market, it needs to be straightforward for them to make money. That means they need to know exactly how to properly evaluate the vehicle for how much money it's worth and then how to merchandise it and confidently sell it to a consumer. But how do I educate somebody about charging at home or on the road? Or how do I articulate what this onboard computer is capable of versus what some of the newer ones are? Sounds like a giant pain in the boat. Why did you want to do this? Because I love it. As any good entrepreneur will say. It's a mountain of challenges, but also opportunity. And after you work at Tesla for five years, especially joining when I did when it was the most shorted company

in the world and very close to bankruptcy, it's really hard to scare me now. Sorry to laugh, but I kind of love that. Let's go check out the auction, can we? Let's go, yeah. There were a couple of big computer monitors on the ceiling right in the middle of where people were working with live auction data on them. What am I looking at up here?

All right, so today we have 22 EVs for sale. Looks like a pretty decent mixture. We've got a bunch of lucids on the top of the board. We've got a Rivian in there and a handful of Teslas. Those cars each have a reserve price. Basically, the price that plug thinks it is worth. The range for that day's auction was from around $20,000 to the high 40s. We have red, yellow, and green.

Red ones, no one has bid on it yet. Yellow, someone has bid on it, but it hasn't hit the reserve price yet. And green means someone has bid on it and it has hit the reserve price. Since we're still about 15 minutes away from the auction ending, only a small number of vehicles have hit their reserve price. Within the next 10 minutes or so, I'd see it will get to the point where most of this board should be turning green. On a daily basis, what percentage of your stuff do you sell? 85%.

Remember that number, 85%, because we're checking back on this auction after the break. First, though, let's do the numbers. Down Dostro's up 263. Today, about a half percent, 54,000, 349. The NASDAQ down, 221. 8 tenths percent finished at 26,363. S&P 500 down 13 points, about a 10th percent, 77, and 23. SpaceX down 13% on the day, posted earnings yesterday. Perhaps you saw that after the bell.

In its first post-IPO earnings report, beat expectations on revenue investors. Well, not thrilled about the amount of capital expenditures in that quarter. More than $18 billion. Most of SpaceX's CAPX, of course, is AI, not rockets. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Risdahl. We're going back to my conversation with Jimmy Douglas, the founder and CEO of a company called Plug. It's a platform built specifically for used electric vehicles, buying and selling them in an online auction that happens every weekday. New car market is sort of the ground zero of the used car market.

That's right. And American carmakers are running screaming away from EVs. What does that mean for you? At a macro level, the rest of the world, one in three new cars sold our EVs now. Yep. 75% of those cars are now made in China. Yeah. In order to stay competitive in the global market when we get to the other side of this decade,

our Detroit Big Three are going to have to get to a place where they are rolling, compelling, affordable, electrified units off the factory lines. I have great conviction that that's where we're going, regardless of kind of the yo-yo effect of administration changes. Literally, you bet your business on that, but are we looking at like plug Beijing in five years? I would never say never. We definitely have international aspirations, but there's plenty of opportunity here just with the units in operation on the ground today and the production that is still going on. About the sort of wave of used EV sales that we're seeing now, right?

A lot of that was seeded by incentives during the Biden administration. They're not coming to market. And then they're going away. Is it you just kind of going la la la la la and keeping on going straight ahead? They're actually not going away. They're going to get sold again and again. So one of the underappreciated phenomenons about EVs is it's not totally. totally known exactly how long they will be good on the road. But the bit of publicly accessible

longevity data we have on high voltage battery packs is that they are going to keep going well beyond two, three hundred thousand miles. So it stands to reason that the average EV will trade hands and then participate in the used car market more times than the average combustion car, maybe twice as much. Sorry, just looking at this board up here. Yep. It's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, twenty two total, eight of which have no bids? Yep. So what does that mean? I mean, do you own those cars and you're like, please, come buy my car? Majority of the vehicles on here, we do own, but the reality is most of these auctions don't really start heating up until the last five minutes of the day. All right, well,

we have to kill 15 minutes then. That's easy. Hey, Anita, you want to meet these guys? You can say no, it's okay. It's totally okay. Anita Darren is a buyer working with people who are looking to sell their EVs. So a customer would submit their car. I give them a good offer, and then they accept it. They do an inspection just on their phone. I review the inspection, and then we do all paperwork and payment online. How does one get into this line of work? There's, like, different routes to get there.

What's yours? Yeah, okay. So I worked at Starbucks, so I was customer service, and then I had like a very small car rental business where I was just like buying gas cars. So, yeah, this is a place full of people who are into cars. That cash offer that Anita gives EV owners, it's based on what Plug thinks the car is going to go for at auction the following day. Now that the platform is starting to grow, we need to look at the technology that we built to get it from zero to one and properly evaluate if that's the right technology to go from one to 100.

And what that's manifesting in is how we process financial transactions. So said in another way, we are using payment rails from other technology companies to fulfill much of this business. And that has gotten to the point where it's slowing us down compared to owning our own. So you've got to build your own. So we have to basically build this into a fintech company. Wow. That's crazy. But that's not what you started out to do, or don't you care? What I started out to do was electrify the used car industry.

And if that means we have to build fintech rails, or if it means we have to buy cars ourselves, it doesn't matter what the task is in order to complete the mission. The mission is the North Star here. With about eight minutes to go in the auction, another flat screen scrolled through detailed information on each of the cars for sale. So 2024 Lucid Air, $35,700. That's the current bid. It will sell for much more than that by the time the auction ends. You keep sounding really confident, man.

I don't know. But I guess you've been doing this. And then here's another one. This one's up on the East Coast. The average selling price for a used EV, again, according to Cox Automotive, is around $38,000. It's better than $56,000 for a new one. Each EV on the auction screen at Plug had its own profile, mileage, year, information on the software, and a bunch of.

data about the battery overall health, size, estimated range. This one still has battery warranty for another 47,000 miles. It has four bids on it. It's out of Carlton, Oregon. It's in front of someone's house. We clearly bought this in someone's driveway yesterday. So it's in front of somebody's house. You bought it yesterday. Yep. And then what happens? If it sells today, then what happens? Then a truck will show up for it probably tomorrow and take it to the dealer that bought it. But you're out at that point, right? Once the transaction is done, you're like, see you? No, I mean, we're a little more full service than that. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't mean to apply you gave up, but you don't have any more responsibilities, right? We might. So about

20% of the time when a dealer buys a car with us, they also dispatch transportation through us. So you're going to be a fintech company, you're going to be a transportation company, as well you've thought through, I'm sure, this could get out of hand in a very big hurry. I like to think of it as vertical integration as an opportunity. We hope to be a fully vertically integrated multi-billion, if not multi-trillion dollar market cap global company. Say that one more time. We hope to be a vertically integrated, multinational, multi-billion, if not multi-trillion dollar company. And your VCs, when you say that to them, what do they say?

They say that is the baseline expectation in order to receive an investment from us. Earlier this year, Plug raised $20 million to keep building out their platform. The bet that Jimmy and his VCs are making is that the used EV market is going to grow and create even more demand for this still pretty specialized marketplace. All right, let's check the board. Where are we here? Yeah, so if you look over here now... Four and a half minutes. Yeah, you've got four and a half minutes yet. Now things are going to start getting a little bit more interesting.

It'll start seeing a little more yellow and green here. So there's only three now with no bids, right? I suppose like eight before. So that's a plus. That's right. If any of these vehicles are really heating up and they keep receiving bids after the final countdown, then they'll actually go into overtime. And that's usually when there's a couple dealers duking it out over some high-value unit.

But wait, if the noon deadline, noon Pacific is, the deadline. Why are you doing extra time? It's like a soccer game, man. Only you know how much time is left. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a countdown. So people know how much time there is left, but some dealers need a little bit more time in order to build conviction about a specific unit, or they just want to wait for the clock to run down before they snipe in a last minute bid. It's all very competitive. All right, three minutes. A handful of people came up behind us to watch the board. The number of dealers bidding up to 29 now. Although not for nothing, all three of those lucid errors that we were talking about before, there's nothing. Nobody wants them.

Oh, no, give it time. That one just got a bid right now. What are you talking about? The one in the upper left. Yeah, no, no, no. We got three with no bids, right? We got a 22 with no bids. Right now.

Those things are going to sell. All right. Well, I'm waiting. We waited. Five years from now, what does this company look like? A lot bigger. We have a 100x mandate over four years. 100X.

What's your stress level? I mean, seriously. It's really not that high. It's honestly lower than what. You know what, baloney? No way. It was higher when I worked at Tesla. All right. Well, there's the Elon factor there.

But, I mean, you've got people depending on you. You've got a brand new company. You've got untested markets. I mean, you've got a lot going on. Yeah, that's why it's important to stay regulated. But no, truthfully, it's all about the team that I get to do this with and the investors that we have behind us and the dealers we work with every day. We have a really good thing going here.

Well, what does the board look like right now? We got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven negotiating. We got one, two, three, four, five, six, six, Seven in overtime. Oh, there's a sold. There's a sold. There's a sold. All right.

So there they go. So you're right. Oh, there's another one. All right. So it's going. Fine. You were right. Fine.

Fine. I can't be right all the time. I just need to be. Just most of the time. Just need to be right just like nominally more than I'm wrong. Final tally. 18 of the 22 cars sold that day, which is by my math, 82%. This final.

This final. note on the way out today, kind of the opposite of EVVs, actually, in which the United States turns out to be the diesel fuel supplier to the world. Saw this in Bloomberg data from the Energy Information Administration, that U.S. distillates exports, that's mostly diesel, some heating fuel, though, too, hit a record 1.9 million barrels a day last week. A couple of things about that. First and again, oil and its derivatives are a global commodity, no matter what you hear anywhere else. Number two, that's got U.S. stockpals as low as they have been since 1996, and three and last, except not last if you hear what I'm about to say.

It is hot now. I know that, but it's only a couple of three months until the Northeast is going to need that home heating oil. Our media production team is Brian Allison, John Foki, Montana Johnson, Drew Jostet. Gary O'Keefe and Charles from Thorpe, Alex Simpson, is the manager of media production. And I'm Kai Rizzdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM.