A NJ Transit train pulls into Newark Penn Station on May 6, 2025. (Photo by New Jersey Monitor)
By NIKITA BIRYUKOV
Republished with permission of N.J. Monitor
NJ Transit and its engineers have reached an agreement to end a three-day strike that entirely stopped rail service on the nation’s busiest commuter rail line, officials announced Sunday.
The deal, which must still be ratified by the union’s members and approved by NJ Transit’s board, comes after a seven-year bargaining standoff that included years of mediation, interventions by two presidential emergency boards, and the first strike to hit the agency in more than 40 years. NJ Transit said service will resume Tuesday.
Details of the tentative agreement remain unknown. Tom Haas, the union’s general chairman at NJ Transit, said it would boost hourly pay for train engineers. Gov. Phil Murphy called the deal “fair and fiscally responsible.”
Though negotiators reached a tentative deal in March that offered wage hikes in line with those accepted by NJ Transit’s 14 other unions, rank-and-file members of the NJ Transit Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen overwhelmingly rejected that agreement.
Engineers argued wage differentials with counterparts at other rail agencies and the lengthy training process for their workers — it takes NJ Transit 20 months to train a locomotive engineer — justified larger wage increases.
Officials at NJ Transit resisted, worrying larger increases would trigger provisions to guarantee similar raises in other unions’ contracts, ballooning the cost of the engineers’ proposal into the hundreds of millions of dollars, costs NJ Transit CEO Kris Kolluri warned would bankrupt the agency.
In the hours ahead of the Friday’s strike deadline, union negotiators offered concessions on work rules and health benefits that would produce savings for the agency and allow larger raises for engineers without triggering increases for other NJ Transit workers, Haas said Friday.
The impact of the strike on New Jersey’s economy was not immediately clear. NJ Transit’s rail service carries roughly 350,000 riders daily, Kolluri has said, and the agency’s contingency plan for a work stoppage could only handle roughly 20% of that volume, and that at a cost of about $4 million per day.
Negotiations spilled into public acrimony with accusations of bad faith negotiation and mental health issues earlier in May, but the two sides appeared to moderate their tone in the final days before the strike.
The union has been working under an expired contract since 2019.
