New Jersey Transit Engineers Strike, Idling Trains and Upending Commutes

New York Times

16-05-2025

The first statewide transit strike in New Jersey in more than 40 years left a fleet of passenger trains parked in rail yards and thousands of commuters stranded, annoyed and bewildered Friday morning.
The strike followed months of negotiations between New Jersey Transit, the nation's third-largest commuter rail network, and the union that represents train drivers, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. Union members began picketing at stations on Friday after contract talks broke down late Thursday night.
State officials said they hoped to resume negotiations with the union over the weekend so that the strike would end before Monday.
Gov. Philip D. Murphy apologized to commuters whose trips had been disrupted and blamed union leaders for refusing to accept an offer that he said was fair to their members and fiscally responsible for the state.
'It is frankly a mess of their own making and it is a slap in the face of every commuter and worker who relies on NJ Transit,' Mr. Murphy, a Democrat, said at a news conference in Aberdeen, N.J.
Thomas Haas, the union's general chairman, said his negotiating team had been optimistic about reaching an agreement until late Thursday.
'They decided to walk away,' Mr. Haas said. 'It's definitely frustrating, but we're willing to go back to the table.'
Some commuters did not learn about the shutdown until they arrived at their local train stations early Friday.
Leslie Bell, 34, was stuck at the station in Trenton, trying to get to his job as supervisor at a Wawa store in Newark. He had bought NJ Transit tickets in advance and his only option for getting to work on time for his 8 a.m. shift was an Amtrak train that would cost $110.
'I can't pay $110 to get to Newark on Amtrak, plus all the tickets are sold out,' Mr. Bell said. 'This is ridiculous.'
NJ Transit's contingency plan called for providing chartered buses from four spots in the state as substitutes for the idle trains. But the buses could only accommodate about one-fifth of the displaced train riders, and they were not scheduled to start running until Monday.
On a typical weekday, about 70,000 commuters ride NJ Transit trains into New York City. But Kris Kolluri, the agency's chief executive, said the shutdown of the train lines would affect all 350,000 NJ Transit riders, including those who take buses and light rail.
Mr. Kolluri, who has been leading management's bargaining team, said on Friday that he believed the two sides were 95 percent of the way to a deal. The last major sticking point has been a union demand that NJ Transit engineers be paid on par with their counterparts at the other passenger railroads that serve New York City, Amtrak, the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad.
Mr. Haas said his members earned $10 an hour less than engineers at the other railroads. NJ Transit's offer, the union said, amounted to annual increases of about 2.7 percent over 7.5 years, compared with average annual raises of 4.87 percent it recently negotiated with Amtrak.
Mr. Kolluri said NJ Transit had offered the engineers a contract that would have brought their starting hourly wage to nearly $50, close to what the L.I.R.R. pays. He said a tentative contract that union members overwhelmingly rejected last month would have raised their average annual pay to $172,000 from $135,000.
Union officials disputed those figures, saying that the engineers' annual base pay was only $89,000 and that most earned less than $100,000 a year.
Mr. Kolluri, who called the striking engineers his 'colleagues,' said he expected talks to resume on Sunday, if not sooner.
While Mr. Kolluri and Mr. Murphy spoke to reporters in Aberdeen, a half-dozen striking engineers stood across the street holding signs. They said they loved their jobs and wanted to get back to work as soon as a deal could be reached.
'I feel bad for the people we move every day, the worker bees and the sports fans,' said Michael Delatore, 37, who drove a Coast Line train on its last run to Long Branch Thursday night. He said he was anxious and 'stressed' about being on strike and was willing to return to work 'immediately.'
By taking the drastic action of walking out, the engineers probably gained the upper hand in the bargaining, at least temporarily, Bill Dwyer, an associate teaching professor at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, said in an interview on Friday.
'If there's a power imbalance, I think it goes in favor of the union at this point,' he said.
Shutting down the railroad 'gives the union additional leverage because the ridership is not going to be happy,' Professor Dwyer said. The transit agency's customers, he added, are 'going to be very impatient' about having their service restored.
Still, he said, that advantage may be short-lived if New Jersey Transit retaliates by cutting off payments for the engineers' health insurance. Striking workers would start to feel the financial pinch of not getting paid after a couple of weeks, he said. Having to cover their own health-care costs could compound that discomfort quickly.
'They are escalating the situation,' Professor Dwyer said, referring to the union, 'and the bigger guns might start coming out.'
Matt Stratton, 47, a banker from Glen Ridge, N.J., who takes a train into Manhattan regularly, said he dreaded what would happen if the strike continued into next week.
'I have no idea how I'm getting to work on Monday,' he said while standing on a platform at Pennsylvania Station in Newark. 'I'm actively looking into figuring out what to do.'
Mr. Stratton expressed no sympathy for either side in the dispute.
'We just had a fare increase, and reliability is terrible,' he said. 'I was delayed every day last week. It's hard to be sympathetic just based on the poor service.'