While NJ Transit Strike is looming, runners are warned to prepare for “chaos”

Like the post-pandemic return to New York offices has taken a sustained dynamic, tens of thousands of New Jersey commuters are warned that they may need to work at home if train engineers go on strike later this month.

In the midst of the negotiations tense with the union which represents its train drivers, the New Jersey Transit began to say on Wednesday to its customers to prepare for the closure of the rail service across the state in mid-May. It would be the first strike of this type in New Jersey in more than 40 years.

The agency presented an emergency plan which involves replacing the buses to some of the trains which transport 70,000 shuttle to Manhattan a typical day of the week. But Kris Kolluri, the new managing director of New Jersey Transitsaid that the additional bus service, from four lots of “park and rolls” in the state, could only carry 20% of daily riders.

“Buses can never meet the demand we have in the trains,” said Kolluri, adding that each bus has around 100 passengers, compared to 1,000 on an average train. “People who have the capacity to work at home during the strike should plan to do so.”

Mr. Kolluri, who resumed the agency in January, has been trying for weeks to determine a new contract with the brotherhood of locomotive engineers and trainmen, which represents around 460 New Jersey public transport engineers. Last month, the two parties announced that they had entered into an agreement, but in mid-April, the basic engineers massively rejected the conditions.

This rejection began a 30 -day countdown to a deadline on May 16. From this date, on Friday, the agency advised its customers to work at home if they can and to limit their use of the rail system to “essential ends”.

The emergency plan would come into force on Monday, May 19 following, said Kolluri. He said that the plan announcement was not a negotiation tactic.

“We have the obligation to tell our runners what will happen on the system,” he said. “Two weeks are not long so that people start to think about how they are going to face this.”

Negotiations resumed on Wednesday morning and should continue next week, but Mr. Kolluri does not seem full of hope, referring to “chaos that the union is determined to create”.

Last week, Mr. Kolluri canceled the previous offer of the agency, which, according to him, would have provided annual wages of $ 172,000 on average, compared to around $ 135,000 now. “The union voted an agreement that has been negotiated in good faith,” he said.

Kolluri said that engineers’ demand for a salary increase of 14% would cost taxpayers and transit $ 1.363 billion between July 2025 and June 2030. “It is $ 684 million more than the members of the contract proposal voted on April 15,” said the agency.

In an information sheet published on its website, the agency has declared that access to union requests would require either “drastic reductions to serve at the system level”, an increase in prices of 17% or an increase of 27% of companies’ transit costs, a tax on companies that the state legislature approved last year to fill a wide difference in the agency’s budget. NJ transit Rates increased by 15% Last year, on a system scale to fill this gap.

The union officials said that these estimates were wild and that the contract they were looking for would only cost about 250 million dollars at the agency. They argued that their members were underpaid compared to engineers working for suburban railways operated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York.

“Our members are angry,” said Tom Haas, the president of the union after his members voted for the agreement in March. “Me, with other NJ transit engineers, I made the trains move, but we left without increase since 2019, during a period of high inflation and throughout the pandemic which claimed some of our colleagues.”

The Union of Engineers is the only one of the 15 unions who represent the workers of NJ Transit who did not accept the agency’s proposal for a contract which took place until June 2024. This agreement provided a total salary increase of 12% over four years.

Most NJ Transit unions have also agreed with a contract which offered 3% of annual increases until June 2027. The agreement that the engineers’ union had concluded last month included an increase of 4% for the year from July 1, 2027.