UPDATED: NJ Transit engineers strike

Some 350,000 commuters who work in New Jersey and New York City scrambled for other ways to reach their destinations after New Jersey Transit engineers walk off the job early Friday, May 16.

It is the state’s first transit strike in more than 40 years.

NJ Transit, the nation’s third largest transit system, operates buses and rail in the state, providing nearly 1 million weekday trips, including into New York City.

The walkout halted all NJ Transit commuter trains, which provide heavily used public transit routes between New York City’s Penn Station on one side of the Hudson River and communities in northern New Jersey on the other as well as the Newark airport, which has grappled with unrelated delays of its own recently.

At a press conference Friday morning, May 16, Gov. Phil Murphy, D-N.J., said, “It did not have to come to this.”

He said NJ Transit officials have been worked for months to avoid the strike. “And now they are continuing to work around the clock to rearrange our state’s entire transportation system so it can to the best of our abilities meet the needs of New Jerseyans.”

The highest priority is addition to making the system work is “reaching a fair and affordable deal as soon as humanly possible,” Murphy said.

”A deal that provides NJ Transit’s employees, including our locomotive engineers, the wages and benefits they deserve without being forced to raise costs on riders, commuters and taxpayers.”

Main sticking point

Wages have been the main sticking point of the negotiations between the agency and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. The union says its members earn an average salary of $113,000 a year and says an agreement could be reached if the transit agency chief executive Kris Kolluri agrees to an average yearly salary of $170,000.

NJ Transit leadership, though, disputes the union’s data, saying the engineers have average total earnings of $135,000 annually, with the highest earners exceeding $200,000.

“I cannot keep giving money left and right to solve a problem,” Kolluri recently said. “It all comes down to, who is going to pay for this? Money does not grow on trees.”

Tom Haas, the union’s general chairman, has said NJ Transit has adopted a “take it or leave it” approach to salaries during the negotiations.

“We have sought nothing more than equal pay for equal work, only to be continuously rebuffed by New Jersey Transit,” Haas said during a news conference Friday, May 9. ”New Jersey Transit engineers want to keep the trains moving, but the simple fact is that trains do not run without engineers.”

Before the strike began, NJ Transit said it planned to increase bus service if the engineers walked out, saying it would add “very limited” capacity to existing New York commuter bus routes in close proximity to rail stations and will contract with private carriers to operate bus service from key regional park-and-ride locations during weekday peak periods.

However, the agency notes that the buses would not be able to handle close to the same number of passengers - only about 20 percent of current rail customers - so it is urged people who can work from home to do so if there is a strike.

NJ Transit said the chartered buses will run from four satellite lots across the state to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan or to PATH train stations in north Jersey, starting Monday, May 19. The PATH system is operated by a subsidiary of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and its services would not be affected by the potential strike.

As many as 1,000 passengers are on a full train each day, and roughly 70,000 commuters take the trains each day. NJ Transit says each chartered bus could carry only about 100 passengers.

Officials expect some train customers will switch to existing NJ Transit bus routes or use the chartered carriers. Others may choose to drive into New York City, where they would have to pay congestion pricing fees.

The walkout comes a month after union members overwhelmingly rejected a labor agreement with management. Both sides had earlier said the tentative agreement included a “reasonable wage increase” for union members as well as the resolution of a long-standing grievance.

Kolluri has said the offer would have raised the average annual pay of full-time engineers to $172,000 from $135,000, but union leaders say those figures were inflated.

Since that proposal was rejected, the two sides have traded jabs over the labor dispute, which goes back to 2019, when the engineers’ contract expired. Union leaders say train engineers have gone without a raise in the past five years and are just seeking pay parity with engineers who work for other rail agencies.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.