Live Updates: New Jersey Transit Strike Leaves Commuters Searching for Rides

New York Times

16-05-2025

Representatives from the locomotive engineers union for NJ Transit outside of Newark Penn Station at a brief presser on Thursday, after the union declared they would go on strike at 12:01 on Friday morning.
The New Jersey Transit strike, the first by transit workers in the state since 1983, came after many months of fruitless negotiations and federal interventions. The National Mediation Board called representatives of the two sides to Washington on Monday in an attempt to reduce tensions.
That was the third try in Washington to broker an accord. Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called a Presidential Emergency Board last June to mediate the dispute. That panel recommended contract terms closer to what NJ Transit was offering than what the engineers demanded.
A second Presidential Emergency Board then tried to tackle the matter. In January, it too sided with NJ Transit's offer as more reasonable than the union's demands.
Mr. Kolluri took the reins of the agency in January at the behest of Mr. Murphy, New Jersey's second-term governor, and made settling with the engineers' union a priority. In March, he shook hands with a union official on an agreement that appeared to resolve the longstanding impasse. But in mid-April, the union's members overwhelmingly rejected that tentative contract.
The engineers demanded to be paid on par with their counterparts who drive trains for Amtrak and the other commuter railroads in the region — the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad. Mr. Kolluri has refused to agree to such a big increase, saying that it would raise the average annual pay of the engineers to $172,000 from $135,000, and could force the agency to raise fares by 17 percent or more.
Thomas Haas, the general chairman of the engineers' union, contended that those figures were inflated. He said that his members earned about $10 an hour less than their peers.
The engineers' union was the only one of the 15 unions representing New Jersey Transit employees that had not negotiated a deal with the agency in recent years.
After the engineers rejected the terms of the tentative agreement in April, Mr. Kolluri returned to the bargaining table with union officials. But he presented the same offer that had just been rejected, angering the engineers.
Mr. Haas said that Mr. Kolluri did not want to work out a deal. Mr. Kolluri, in turn, said he wondered about Mr. Haas's mental health.
All the while, Mr. Murphy, who had promised to 'fix' NJ Transit, was monitoring the proceedings from a distance.
The governor said on Wednesday night that he had been 'talking literally constantly' with Mr. Kolluri. Mr. Murphy said the two sides had made 'enormous progress,' and he hoped that each would walk away with an agreement that provided 'a piece of what they wanted and maybe a piece of, you know, that they didn't get.'