NEW YORK CITY—New Jersey rail engineers have threatened to strike on May 16 over a salary dispute, potentially halting service to 350,000 riders in the New Jersey and New York area.
The strike would begin at 12 a.m. on Friday if an agreement is not reached and would shut down NJ Transit rail services as well as Metro-North rail lines west of the Hudson River.
NJ Transit has a contingency plan to operate more commuter buses in the case of a strike, but estimates it could handle only 20 percent of the usual train customers.
The engineers union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET), has 450 NJ Transit engineers in its organization.
BLET says that NJ Transit engineers have not had a pay raise since 2019, and that NJ Transit engineers are the lowest-paid train engineers of any of the major passenger railways. BLET said its members shot down a new tentative wage agreement between it and NJ Transit in April, with 87 percent voting no.
NJ Transit posted on its website that their train engineers make an average of $135,000 annually, and the agreement they proposed would raise it to $172,856 by mid 2027. This is competitive pay for the region, according to NJ Transit.
The BLET held a press conference on May 10 to respond. The union’s general chairman Tom Haas said that the average salary for NJ Transit engineers is $113,000—not $135,000.
Hass said the union is seeking an increase to about $120,000 a year by 2027, a salary that he said would be comparable to salaries of other engineers in the United States.
NJ Transit said that BLET’s proposal would raise wages to an unacceptable level; that it isn’t reasonable to live and work in New Jersey but be paid a New York salary.
NJ Transit estimates that the BLET’s current demand would cost more than $1.36 billion over the next five years. The money would come from either a 17 percent fare increase or a systemwide reduction to service.
Haas disagreed that raise would cost $1.36 billion, and said it would amount to $4 million more per year than the last proposal by NJ Transit.
“What we have put on the table is something that we feel is fiscally responsible and fair to New Jersey Transit’s engineers,” Haas said.
