Labor Day Weekend Travel, 9/11 Detainee Deal, Job Numbers

It's set to be one of the busiest travel weekends of the year, topping even the last Labor Day weekend before the pandemic.

Will airline strikes and the fallout from Hurricane Idalia make a mess?

I'm a Martinez that is Michelle Martin, and this is a burst from NPR News.

For Mr Al Baluchi, there is essentially no chance that there will be a plea deal by Friday.

Despite the pessimism, is a settlement still possible?

And August job numbers are out today.

Workers are quite confident in their ability to land better, alternative jobs.

What's the latest on hiring trends and what could that spell for the wider economy? Stay with us, we'll give you the news you need to start your day.

On the Ted Radio Hour, MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle her latest research into the intimate relationships people are having with chatbots.

Technologies that say, I care about you, I love you, I'm here for you, take care of me.

The pros and cons of artificial intimacy. That's on the Ted Radio Hour from NPR.

This holiday weekend is expected to be one of the busiest travel periods of the year.

Yeah, tropical Storm Adalia could create delays, and earlier this week, American Airlines flight attendants threatened to strike against the airliner unless it met pay and benefit demands. So what does this mean for your travel plans?

David Koenig, Airlines reporter for The Associated Press, has some answers and is with us now. Good morning David.

Hi Michelle, good morning.

So what can travelers expect this weekend?

You nailed it. It's going to be busy on the roads, at the airport, it is going to be a really crowded one. The Auto Club AAA is saying that travel bookings of all kinds, and that includes flights, hotels, rental cars. They're up 4 over last year's Labor Day, and TSA is expecting to screen about 11 more air travelers than they did over the holiday last year.

And, you know, parts of the country are still recovering from the damage of that tropical storm. It's now a tropical storm. Adalia Do we have a sense of whether that is going to affect travel?

The good news is that Adalia has moved out, it's gone off into the Atlantic. We did have about 1,700 flights that were canceled between Tuesday and Wednesday, and most of those were in Florida and Georgia. Because of the storm, the airline schedules at least have recovered. I mean, there's still power outages and a lot of damage left by the storm, but air travel seems to have recovered.

That's remarkable. What about the strike authorization by American Airlines flight attendants?

The short answer is no. They're not going to strike anytime soon. They did authorize their union to call for a strike. If it comes to that, they are currently negotiating, they haven't had pay raises since 2019, and they're very frustrated with the pace of negotiations with the company.

We've talked a lot about flights, but what about people who are traveling by road? what can they expect?

So we are expecting that to be an issue, too, AAA says. If you're driving, go early in the morning or later in the day to avoid the heaviest traffic. Because there are going to be lots of other folks with you.

All right, that's David Koenig with the Associated Press. David, thank you so much.

Thank you, Michelle.

This month marks the 22nd anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

Yeah, and in all that time, there has been no trial. A breakthrough seemed to happen last year, though, when settlement talks began with the five men accused of plotting the attack. But now government prosecutors say they're going to quit negotiating unless the defense offers to settle today.

And we have Sasha Pfeiffer is here with us to tell us how real that deadline is. Sasha, Good morning, how real is it?

Probably not very. The background is that so far, the effort to have a 9-11 death penalty trial has been a complete failure. That's partly because it's happening at the U.S military Court in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A logistical nightmare. And by the way, as you and I have talked about, these five accused men, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have been held at Guantanamo for nearly 20 years now.

For Mr Al-Baluchi, there is essentially no chance that there will be a plea deal by Friday.

And even in the highly unlikely event that a signed plea offer were made today, it would still have to be approved by higher-level officials. So no one I've spoken with in the Guantanamo community believes the 9-11 case could be wrapped up today.

Have you had a chance to investigate what the families of 9-11 victims think about all this?

Yeah, I've talked to a lot of them and many support plea deals because they see the dysfunction at Guantanamo and they doubt a trial will ever happen.

My fear is that if we don't pursue plea deals, and if the Biden administration doesn't put their full support behind this. I am 28 years old, turning 29.

And others, of course, want the defendants put to death. In fact, last week, about 2,000 9-11 victims and family members signed a letter to Biden expressing concern about plea deals. But one organizer, Michelle, told me, his concern is not about abandoning the death penalty, it's about not having a trial, being a lost opportunity. That is Brett Eagleson.

I think plea deals will probably likely happen, and I think that under the right conditions, plea deals would help the broader 9-11 community in our pursuit of justice.

What does he mean by under the right conditions?

He says that a stipulation of a plea agreement should be that the defendants have to share information about how they carried out the attacks.

And finally, if the plea deals don't happen, will the government keep trying to take the case to trial?

Yes, but that means more pre-trial hearings, which have been going on for a decade.

That's NPR's Sasha Pfeiffer, Sasha, thank you.

You're welcome.

As we head into the Labor Day weekend, we want to give you some news this morning about the labor market.

Yeah, the government has been tallying the number of jobs that employers added last month. The count is expected to show steady but not spectacular job gains.

NPR's Scott Horsley is with us now with a preview of today's employment report. Good morning Scott.

Good morning Michelle.

Alright, you've told us this before. That hiring cooled off in the early part of the summer. So what do forecasters think? Do they think that that trend continued into August?

They do. The predictions are for somewhere around 170,000 jobs being added last month, similar to what we saw in June and July. That would be a slowdown from the pace of hiring earlier in the year. But employers are still adding more than enough jobs to keep the unemployment rate near a 50-year low. Julia Pollock, who is chief economist at the job search website ZipRecruiter, says. One sign of the less frenzied job market these days is that fewer workers are quitting jobs in search of better opportunities.

Workers are quite confident in their ability to land better, alternative jobs. But they're nowhere near as high as what we saw earlier in the pandemic, when there were so many job openings that people were in the midst of a great reshuffling.

Many of the measures the government uses to track the job market are now back to where they were just before the pandemic. And keep in mind that was a very good job market with a historically low unemployment rate of 3.5, just like now.

So businesses aren't adding as many workers, are some of them cutting jobs?

Some are, but we are not seeing widespread layoffs. New applications for unemployment benefits are still quite low. In July, the Jobs report showed only a few industries actually losing jobs manufacturing and warehousing, among them. Even construction, has continued to add jobs. Despite the sharp run-up in interest rates. Ordinarily, when the Federal Reserve hits the brakes this hard in order to fight inflation, you would expect to see a rise in unemployment.

It will come as a relief to the Federal Reserve. The slowdown is coming in the form of reduced hiring and reduced job openings, not in the form of a huge surge in layoffs and unemployment.

Pollock says the question now is whether the job market is at a comfortable cruising altitude, where it can just hold steady for a while. Or if it's going to continue to slow down to the point where we do actually see some job cuts?

And finally, one indicator of a tight job market that the Fed watches closely is wages. It's also something we all watch closely. So what's happening with people's paychecks?

Wages are still rising, although not as fast as they were a year ago. The good news is, prices aren't going up as fast as they were, so wage gains are no longer being gobbled up by inflation. One reason wages aren't going up as fast as they were is that employers now have more workers to choose from. In recent months, we have seen a lot more people joining the workforce, especially women. In fact, the share of working-age women who are in the job market is now close to an all-time high, which is very encouraging.

That is NPR's Scott, Horsey Scott, thank you.

You're welcome.

And that's up first for Friday, September 1st. I'm Michelle Martin.

And I'm a Martinez. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Alice Wolfley, Bob Little, Rafael Nam and Olivia Hampton. It was produced by Mansi Khurana, Claire Murashima and Chad Campbell. We get engineering support from Hannah Glubna.

Up First airs on Saturday, too. Aisha Roscoe and Scott Simon have the news. It will be here in this feed or wherever you get your podcasts.