NEW YORK CITY—New Jersey Transit train engineers went on strike on May 16, halting service to 350,000 riders in the New Jersey and New York area.
The strike began at 12 a.m. on Friday after an agreement was not reached in the latest round of negotiations on Thursday.
“We presented them the last proposal; they rejected it and walked away with two hours left on the clock,” said Tom Haas, general chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET).
NJ Transit CEO Kris Kolluri described the situation as a “pause in the conversations.”
“I certainly expect to pick back up these conversations as soon as possible,” he said late Thursday during a joint news conference with New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. “If they’re willing to meet tonight, I’ll meet them again tonight. If they want to meet tomorrow morning, I’ll do it again. Because I think this is an imminently workable problem. The question is, do they have the willingness to come to a solution.”
Murphy said it was important to “reach a final deal that is both fair to employees and at the same time affordable to New Jersey’s commuters and taxpayers.”
“Again, we cannot ignore the agency’s fiscal realities,” Murphy said.
The strike shut down NJ Transit rail services as well as Metro-North rail lines west of the Hudson River.
NJ Transit has a contingency plan to operate more commuter buses in the case of a strike, but estimates it could handle only 20 percent of the usual train customers.
The engineers union BLET has 450 NJ Transit engineers in its organization.
BLET says that NJ Transit engineers have not had a pay raise since 2019, and that NJ Transit engineers are the lowest-paid train engineers of any of the major passenger railways. BLET said its members shot down a new tentative wage agreement between it and NJ Transit in April, with 87 percent voting no.
NJ Transit posted on its website that their train engineers make an average of $135,000 annually, and the agreement they proposed would raise it to $172,856 by mid 2027. This is competitive pay for the region, according to NJ Transit.
The BLET held a press conference on May 10 to respond. Haas said that the average salary for NJ Transit engineers is $113,000—not $135,000.
Hass said the union is seeking an increase to about $120,000 by 2027, a salary that he said would be comparable to salaries of other engineers in the United States.
NJ Transit said that BLET’s proposal would raise wages to an unacceptable level; that it isn’t reasonable to live and work in New Jersey but be paid a New York salary.
NJ Transit estimates that the BLET’s current demand would cost more than $1.36 billion over the next five years. The money would come from either a 17 percent fare increase or a systemwide reduction to service.
Haas disagreed that raise would cost $1.36 billion, and said it would amount to $4 million more per year than the last proposal by NJ Transit.
“What we have put on the table is something that we feel is fiscally responsible and fair to New Jersey Transit’s engineers,” Haas said.
