A strike that shut down the Long Island Rail Road, America’s busiest passenger rail service, upended the routines of a quarter million weekday riders on Monday, with little hope of a quick resolution in sight.
Many commuters who rely on the railroad, which carries about 270,000 people a day between New York City and its eastern suburbs, got their first taste of what a protracted labor dispute could look like as they took a patchwork of buses, car pools and subway trains to clock in on time.
Or not.
“Three hours going to work is just not worth it — my job doesn’t pay that much,” Vanessa Zhang, 38, said in an interview Monday morning at the Hicksville station on Long Island, where transit officials were providing a limited number of shuttle buses to Queens.
She had missed the last bus to get to her retail sales job in Midtown Manhattan by a hair. Her only other options were to take her chances on a different, unfamiliar bus network, or order a pricey Uber.
“I’ll take a sick day,” she said, before heading home.
Members of five unions that represent about half the work force on the Long Island Rail Road — more than 3,500 employees, including engineers, signal workers and others who are vital to train operation — walked off the job early Saturday morning, after three years of failed efforts to secure higher wages. They have not received a raise since 2022.
The shutdown was gearing up to be a painful ordeal for riders with few other options, a major economic strain on the region and a growing political liability for Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is seeking re-election this year.
And once a deal is reached, it could take the M.T.A. another 24 hours to move enough trains into place for regular service to resume.
But the prospect of a fast end to the strike was dim on Monday afternoon, officials with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the rail service, said.
“I really have no confidence in this, at this point,” Gary Dellaverson, a former M.T.A. executive and labor negotiator who is advising the authority in the talks, said at a news conference outside the agency’s Lower Manhattan headquarters, over the din of nearby protesters chanting strike slogans.
The state comptroller’s office said that the strike could cost the region $61 million a day in lost economic activity. It could also tarnish what is shaping up to be a busy week for tourism.
The New York Knicks will face the Cleveland Cavaliers at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday in the first game of the Eastern Conference finals, and thousands of fans were expecting to take the L.I.R.R. to the series. And Memorial Day, when thousands of New York City residents flock to Long Island, is less than a week away.
Ms. Hochul said on Monday that negotiations with the five unions were continuing, but did not give an indication if the two sides were any closer to a deal.
The unions said they were willing to accept a retroactive 9.5 percent wage increase covering the last three years — the same deal the M.T.A. offered several other transit and civil service unions in recent months.
But they also were also seeking a 4.5 percent raise in the current year, a demand that exceeds what the agency has offered to other unions.
The M.T.A. has argued that the unions’ wage demands could lead to higher fares for passengers or reductions in service. The authority negotiates with more than 80 different unions, and acceding to much higher wage increases with one group could force it to pay substantially more when other contracts come due.
The unions have pointed to the recommendations of two federal review panels that supported a higher wage increase than the M.T.A. had offered, and said they were unwilling to cede other parts of their contract, like changes to longstanding work rules, that could reduce their overall income.
On Monday, the two sides remained about 1 percentage point apart on wage increases for 2026. The unions rejected an M.T.A. proposal that would have required new employees to cover more health care costs using a model different from the one current employees use.
Cash compensation for members of the five holdout unions averaged over $136,000 in 2025, according to M.T.A. figures, making them among the highest-paid rail workers in the nation.
But leaders of the negotiating unions have argued that their workers don’t make enough money to keep up with the cost of living in one of the country’s most expensive metro areas.
In response to the strike, which shut down 126 rail stations across the region, the M.T.A. began providing free shuttle bus service between a handful of stations on Long Island and two subway stops in Queens.
The authority warned that the buses could accommodate only about 13,000 riders during the morning and evening rushes, but by Monday afternoon, fewer than 2,200 riders had used the service, according to the M.T.A. Reserving the buses could cost the agency about $550,000 a day.
Carlos Velez, 52, an L.I.R.R. crew dispatcher who joined the picket line on Monday, said he felt bad for riders, but that the move was necessary.
“I’d be on the first train to Jamaica to continue my job” if a deal was reached, he said, referring to a busy rail hub.
Many stranded riders said they sympathized with the unions — but interviews suggested they had their limits.
Mandy Ramzan, 50, who lives in Long Island City in Queens, joined a long line of rerouted commuters at a bus stop on Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing.
She was transferring from the No. 7 train in the hopes of getting to her job in Great Neck in Nassau County, where she is the director of an assisted living center.
That detour was adding an hour to her morning commute, she said.
Standing in line with a warming iced coffee, Ms. Ramzan said she had mixed feelings about the labor dispute.
“Listen, people deserve to be paid. I get it,” she said. “But there are also a lot of commuters who are really feeling it this morning.”
The strike is unwelcome for Ms. Hochul, whose opponent in the November governor’s race, Bruce Blakeman, a Republican and the Nassau County executive, has close ties to Long Island. Ms. Hochul lost the region in the 2022 election.
“This strike never should have happened,” Mr. Blakeman said in a statement. “Union leaders do not trust Kathy Hochul when she says she doesn’t have the money for their workers,” he added, before criticizing her for providing state aid to migrants and to New York City.
Ms. Hochul has directed some of her frustration at President Trump, whom she has blamed for increasing the odds of a strike. The president controls the National Mediation Board, which last year released the unions from mediation, a decision that cleared the path for a possible walkout.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump said the governor “knows, full well, that I have NOTHING TO DO WITH IT,” before expressing his support for Mr. Blakeman.
The suspension is expected to have an outsize effect on middle-class workers who cannot work from home, both on Long Island and in New York City.
A growing number of Queens residents rely on the Long Island Rail Road, and an influx of passengers from the suburbs who will now need to board the subway in Queens could also make travel more challenging.
“They are going to be heavily impacted,” Tom Wright, the president of the Regional Plan Association, an urban planning think tank, said of these riders.
Queens is home to some busy L.I.R.R. stations, including the hub at Jamaica, where many train lines converge and where riders can connect to the subway and the AirTrain to Kennedy Airport.
The last time Long Island Rail Road workers walked out, in 1994, the dispute was resolved in two days. The longest strike on the railroad occurred in the summer of 1960, when service was suspended for 26 days as workers pushed for better wages and other demands. It led to the institution of a five-day workweek for rail workers.
Sean Piccoli, Nate Schweber and Ashley Southall contributed reporting.
Stefanos Chen is a Times reporter covering New York City’s transit system.
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