Just as the post-pandemic return to offices in New York City has achieved sustained momentum, tens of thousands of commuters from New Jersey are being warned that they may need to work from home if train engineers go on strike later this month.
Amid strained negotiations with the union that represents its train drivers, New Jersey Transit began telling its customers on Wednesday to prepare for a shutdown of the statewide rail service in mid-May. It would be the first such strike in New Jersey in more than 40 years.
The agency laid out a contingency plan that involves substituting buses for some of the trains that carry 70,000 commuters into Manhattan on a typical weekday. But Kris Kolluri, the new chief executive of New Jersey Transit, said that supplemental bus service, from four “park and ride” lots around the state, could carry only about 20 percent of the daily train riders.
“Buses can never satisfy the demand we have on trains,” Mr. Kolluri said, adding that each bus holds about 100 passengers, compared with 1,000 on an average train. “Those folks who have the ability to work from home during the strike should plan to do so.”
Mr. Kolluri, who took over the agency in January, has been trying for weeks to work out a new contract with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, which represents about 460 New Jersey Transit engineers. Last month, the two sides announced that they had reached a deal, but in mid-April the rank-and-file engineers overwhelmingly rejected the terms.
That rejection started a 30-day countdown to a May 16 strike deadline. Beginning on that date, a Friday, the agency advised its customers to work from home if they can and to limit their use of the rail system to “essential purposes only.”
The contingency plan would go into effect on the following Monday, May 19, Mr. Kolluri said. He said that announcing the plan was not a negotiating tactic.
“We have an obligation to tell our riders what is about to happen on the system,” he said. “Two weeks is not a long time for people to start thinking about how they’re going to deal with this.”
Negotiations resumed on Wednesday morning and are expected to continue next week, but Mr. Kolluri did not sound hopeful, referring to the “chaos the union is intent on creating.”
Last week, Mr. Kolluri rescinded the agency’s previous offer, which he said would have provided annual salaries of $172,000 on average, up from about $135,000 now. “The union voted down an agreement that was negotiated in good faith,” he said.
Mr. Kolluri said that the engineers’ demand of a 14 percent wage increase would cost taxpayers and NJ Transit $1.363 billion between July 2025 and June 2030. “That’s $684 million more than the contract proposal union members voted down on April 15,” the agency said.
In a fact sheet posted on its website, the agency said that acceding to the union’s demands would require either “drastic reductions to service systemwide,” a fare increase of 17 percent or a 27 percent increase in the Corporate Transit Fee, a tax on businesses that the state legislature approved last year to bridge a large gap in the agency’s budget. NJ Transit raised fares 15 percent systemwide last year to help fill that gap.
Union officials said that those estimates were wildly inflated and that the contract they were seeking would cost the agency only about $250 million. They argued that their members were underpaid compared with engineers working for the commuter railroads operated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York.
“Our members are angry,” said Tom Haas, the union’s general chairman, after his members voted down the agreement reached in March. “I, along with other NJ Transit engineers, have kept the trains moving, but we have gone without a raise since 2019, during a period of high inflation and throughout the pandemic that claimed some of our co-workers.”
The engineers’ union is the only one of 15 unions that represent NJ Transit workers that did not accept the agency’s proposal for a contract that ran through June 2024. That agreement provided a total wage increase of 12 percent over four years.
Most of NJ Transit’s unions also agreed to a contract that offered 3 percent annual raises through June 2027. The agreement the engineers’ union had reached last month included a 4 percent raise for the year starting July 1, 2027.
Patrick McGeehan is a Times reporter who covers the economy of New York City and its airports and other transportation hubs.
The post As Strike Looms, N.J. Transit Riders Are Warned to Prepare for ‘Chaos’ appeared first on New York Times.
