CNN
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Negotiators for New Jersey Transit and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET), the union representing 450 striking engineers, have reached a tentative labor agreement that could bring an end to the three-day strike, according to the union.
“This is a good result for labor. It’s a good result for NJ Transit. It’s a good result for commuters and taxpayers,” Gov. Phil Murphy said in a Sunday evening press conference.
The engineers are due back at work on Monday. But NJ Transit CEO Kris Kolluri said the railroad needed a day to resume operations, even with the engineers back on the job.
“This is an extraordinarily complex operation,” he said at the press conference. “We run hundreds of trains a day. We have to make sure all the equipment is where it needs to be, all the safety inspections have been done … For us, it is better to get it right, and do it methodically, than to rush and meet some artificial deadline and get it wrong.”
The strike that started Friday had the potential to greatly disrupt the daily commutes of around 100,000 regular customers of the nation’s third-largest commuter railroad, as well as businesses across the New York metropolitan region. It also had the potential to inconvenience fans of Beyoncé, who has five concerts beginning Thursday evening at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, just 10 miles from Midtown Manhattan.
Murphy asked commuters to work from home once again on Monday, as many apparently did on Friday when there was relatively little overcrowding reported on the buses and other forms of transit that were not on strike. He said that Mondays are the second-lightest day of the week for ridership after Fridays and that the railroad wants to be at full strength for the busy Tuesday-through-Thursday period.
The union also said this deal is a good one for both members and the railroad.
“While I won’t get into the exact details of the deal reached, I will say that the only real issue was wages and we were able to reach an agreement that boosts hourly pay beyond the proposal rejected by our members last month and beyond where we were when NJ Transit’s managers walked away from the table Thursday evening,” Tom Haas, the head of a union unit that represents the NJ Transit engineers, said.
“We also were able to show management ways to boost engineers’ wages that will help NJT with retention and recruitment, without causing any significant budget issue or requiring a fare increase,” he added.
Terms of the tentative deal were not immediately available. The agreement still needs to be ratified by the majority of rank-and-file members for the threat of a resumption of the strike to be put to rest. A previous vote on an earlier tentative agreement failed with 87% of members voting no. It also needs to be ratified by the New Jersey Transit board, which appears to be virtually certain.
Murphy and Kolluri said they are hopeful that, this time, the engineers will accept the tentative deal.
“The past is the past,” Kolluri said. “I think we’ve learned some important lessons on what the membership wanted.”
The two sides had both said on Friday that they had been close to a deal to give engineers their first raise since 2019.
The union said they needed a deal that would bring them into parity with engineers at nearby rail systems, including Amtrak as well as commuter lines serving the Philadelphia market, the suburbs north of New York City and Long Island. They said they are losing too many members to those competing railroads without wage parity. The number of engineers at the railroad has fallen by 10% just since the start of the year, according to BLET.
But Murphy and Kolluri insisted that they wanted a contract that gave the engineers a fair wage hike. They said meeting the union’s wage demands would trigger “me too” clauses in the contracts of 14 other unions at the commuter service, which allow unions that have already reached labor deals with the railroad to see their pay raises increase to match whatever the engineers get in their deal.
Murphy and Kolluri insist that the agency could not afford to do that.
But BLET president Mark Wallace insisted the union had presented a way to give his members the wage increases they were demanding without triggering the “me too” clauses in the other union deals.
Railroads operate under an arcane century-old federal law, the Railway Labor Act, that controls labor relations at railroads and airlines, greatly limiting the union’s ability to go on strike. Even when members of a union reject a contract, as has happened in this case, they can be ordered to stay on the job and accept the terms of the deal through an act of Congress.
That’s what happened in December 2022, when Congress voted in favor of a deal rejected by the majority of the more than 100,000 union members who work at the nation’s four major freight railroads.
But Congress had shown no intention to act in the case of a single commuter railroad. While Congress has not allowed the nation’s freight railroads to strike for more than a few hours, there have been numerous commuter rail strikes that have stretched on for weeks, even months, without Congressional action.
Without Congress acting to end the strike, the state and New Jersey Transit were under pressure to reach a quick deal to get the engineers back to work and commuters back on trains. The strike itself was costing NJ Transit about $4 million a day, Kolluri said.
Back in 1983, New Jersey Transit was on strike for one month. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority also went on strike in the 1980s for 108 days. Metro North, which is the commuter line serving the suburbs north of New York, was on strike for 42 days, and the Long Island Rail Road stopped for 11 days.
This story has been updated with additional reporting and context.
