Three days after the start of a strike by New Jersey transit employees, an agreement has been reached under which the unionized employees will return to work, officials announced Sunday.
In a statement, Tom Haas, general chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, which represents 450 New Jersey Transit engineers, said that an agreement had been reached to end the strike, which affected around 100,000 passengers each day across its three-day duration.
“The only real issue was wages and we were able to reach an agreement that boosts hourly pay beyond the proposal rejected by our members last month and beyond where we were when NJ Transit’s managers walked away from the table Thursday evening,” Haas said.
At a Sunday press conference led by Gov. Phil Murphy and NJ Transit CEO Kris Kolluri, details of the compromise were announced.
Transit and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers (BLET) “have reached a tentative agreement, and as a result, New Jersey’s first rail strike in decades has officially come to an end,” Murphy said.
The agreement will still require ratification by union members. The NJ Transit Board is scheduled to vote on the agreement on June 11. Murphy said at the press conference that there’s “a high degree of confidence this will sail.”
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Kolluri, who was also present at the press conference, said that he believes the agreement will address the wage issues and the union’s other concerns.
“The past is the past, but I think we learned some important lessons on what the membership wanted, and I think the union this time did a really good job of clarifying their positions,” he told reporters.
Kolluri stated that both sides were able “to go point by point” during the negotiation process and discuss certain provisions that mattered to the union, adding: “I think we were able to address the satisfaction of them and, equally important, to the taxpayers of New Jersey.”
According to the union, Congress has the authority to intervene and block the strike, but it chose not to do so.
“This should be a lesson for other railroad disputes. Nothing would have been gained by kicking the can down the road. Allowing strikes to happen encourages settlement rather than stonewalling,” BLET national president Mark Wallace said in a statement.
The strike, the state’s first in 40 years, was the culmination of months of negotiations between NJ Transit and the union. In March, 87 percent of union members voted down an agreement.
On Friday, May 16, NJ Transit employees walked off the job, officially beginning a strike that caused all the state’s commuter rail lines to close.
The strike left hundreds of thousands unsure about whether they would be able to get to work on Monday.
According to officials, these commuters will still need to find alternative means of transportation, as train services will not resume until Tuesday.
“To offer the understatement of the year, this is a very good outcome,” Murphy said.
The proposed compromise would be “fair to NJ Transit’s employees while also being affordable to our commuters and taxpayers,” he said.
