Six years of frustration and months of talks came to a head Thursday at 9:50 p.m. when NJ Transit executives walked away from the negotiating table with union leaders, setting the stage for the Garden State’s most consequential transportation strike in more than 40 years.
NJ Transit President and CEO Kris Kolluri said the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen were simply asking for a raise so high it would have put the railroad on track to financial ruin.
“I ended the meeting by saying the following: You have put forward a proposal that seems fair to you, but it doesn't solve our fundamental issue of fiscal responsibleness,” Kolluri said at a news conference Friday morning. “That doesn't sound to me like I left in a huff and a puff, that sounds like what reasonable people do.”
He also raised concerns over what’s referred to as a “me-too” clause in union contracts, which would give other NJ Transit unions pay raises proportionate to whatever the engineers receive in their new contract.
BLET First Vice President Gary Best, who was at the negotiating table at NJ Transit’s Newark headquarters, said he was surprised when management walked away more than two hours before the strike deadline.
“ We got our engineers where we thought they needed to be. [NJ Transit] caucused for, let's say, 30 or 40 minutes,” Best said. “When they came back in, they said they couldn't accept our terms and they were done.”
Engineers walked off the job at 12:01 a.m. Friday, shutting down all of NJ Transit’s rail service.
Members of the National Mediation Board ordered both sides to return to the table for further negotiations on Sunday, meaning the strike will likely continue through the weekend.
The entire NJ Transit section at Manhattan's Penn Station was cordoned off Friday morning, with no trains moving in or out. Confused commuters across New Jersey funneled into alternate modes of mass transit, including coach buses, ferries and the PATH train.
The entire NJ Transit area at New York City's Penn Station was closed Friday, with no trains moving in or out.
By one measure, the strike has been months in the making: The union’s leadership came to a tentative contract agreement with NJ Transit in March, but the group’s roughly 450 rank-and-file members voted it down in April.
By another measure, the strike has been brewing for six years, as the locomotive engineers have been without a new contract since 2019.
“We haven’t had a pay raise in six years. All of those other organizations have. So our locomotive engineers have worked through COVID, they’ve worked through the worse inflationary period in my lifetime, all without a pay raise,” BLET National President Mark Wallace said at a picket line at New York Penn Station.
Kolluri said the transit workers “wanted a number that we got very close to in our negotiations” by way of a pay raise.
Bill Dwyer, a professor at Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations, said NJ Transit should have anticipated that other unions will seek to match the locomotive engineers’ new contract.
“ They should have seen it coming,” he added. “The public is not happy with NJ Transit to start with. This only compounds their problems in terms of public image.”
