New Jersey traffic trains engineers have officially started their strike, closing the nearby trains and leaving hundreds of thousands of travelers fighting to find other modes of transport.
The members of the Union of the Brotherhood of Engineers of Locomotoras and Trenmen (Blet) had threatened to go on strike unless NJ Transit officials and the union could agree on new terms and conditions of the contract for workers who conduct trains.
An agreement was close but not reached, according to the governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, which resulted in all the traffic near trains of New Jersey and the MTA Metro-North West of Hudson Service to stop working when the strike began at 12:01 am on Friday.
An electronic screen advises travelers of possible interruptions of the NJ Transit Service at the Secaucus Union station in Secaucus, NJ, Wednesday, May 14, 2025.
Seth Wenig/Ap
On Thursday, both parties met again for 11 -hour negotiations to avoid the strike, in addition to a meeting in Washington, DC, on Monday with the National Mediation Board, but no resolution was reached.
During a press conference on Thursday night, Murphy and the CEO of NJ Transit, Kris Kolluri, encouraged travelers to work from home on Friday.
“If you can work from home, certainly tomorrow, and you’re looking at that it would be a very good day to do it,” Murphy said.
Kolluri said Thursday night that there was imminently attainable treatment and negotiations were not a “lost cause.” Negotiations are expected to resume on Sunday morning, according to Kolluri.
After a meeting of the New Jersey Transit Board on Wednesday, Koluri told journalists that he was “safe and optimistic” about his efforts to avoid a strike.
“I’m going to stay at the negotiating table as long as necessary,” Kolluri said. “If two are needed for tango, I think that if we can all focus on the task in question, which is to obtain a fair and affordable agreement, I think we can avoid a strike.”
Blet’s national president Mark Wallace said during a press conference on May 9 that five years have passed since trains engineers who work for NJ Transit have received a salary increase.
“Reasonable people would vote for a fair agreement,” Wallace said.
People flow from a Transit Cercanías train of NJ after reaching the Traffic Terminal on November 2, 2022, in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Gary Hershorn/ABC News
Tom Haas, Blet’s general president, said during the same press conference that engineers who work for NJ Transit earn an average salary of $ 113,000 a year. If the New Jersey Transit CEO, Kris Kolluri, accepts an average salary of $ 170,000 a year for engineers, then “we obtained an agreement,” said Haas.
“NJ traffic locomotive engineers already have average total earnings of $ 135,000 annually, with the highest winners exceeding $ 200,000,” according to a statement on the New Jersey transit website with respect to negotiations with the Blet.
During a separate press conference on May 9, Kolluri responded to the union’s arguments, saying that Haas previously agreed to a salary increase to $ 49.82 per hour, but then demanded even higher wages because he thought there was a “better boat at the end of the rainbow.”
“I cannot continue to give money to the left and the right to solve a problem. Everything is reduced to, who will pay for this? The money does not grow in the trees,” Kolluri said.
ABC news requests sent to NJ Transit and the Slet to comment on the statements of Wallace, Haas and Kolluri on the salary increase in claims did not receive an answer.
NJ Transit establishes that if they accept Blet’s terms, it would cost them both and the taxpayers of New Jersey $ 1,363 billion between July 2025 and June 2030. In addition, if Blet chooses to attack, the cost of taxpayers to provide a limited alternative service through buses would be $ 4 million per day, NJ transit claims.
The president of Metro-North, Justin Vonashek, announces traffic options for Port Jervis Line and Pascack Valley Line customers if there is a NJ traffic strike next week, on May 8, 2025, in Tarrytown, New York.
Tania Savayan/Westchester County News Journal through USA Network through Imagn Images
NJ Transit officials have saying The strike “would interrupt the life of more than 350,000 travelers” and developed a contingency plan That includes adding “very limited capacity to existing New York bus routes in the vicinity of railway stations and hiring with private carriers to operate the bus service” for travelers who generally depend on trains.
But even with the expanded bus service, NJ Transit said that “it estimates that it can only transport approximately 20% of current rail clients” because the bus system does not have the ability to replace the travelers rail service.
Xuan Sharon Di, associate professor of Civil Engineering and Engineering mechanics at Columbia University, told ABC News before the strike began that it could be a “disaster” for traffic in Manhattan due to the increase in bus and cars traffic to the city of travelers who could not take the train. There will also be the additional penalty of travelers to Manhattan having to pay recently congestion price.
“New Jersey traffic is the backbone so that people living in New Jersey move. This is really shocking to me,” Di told ABC News about the perspective of a strike.
Steven Chien, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, said that many of his colleagues use NJ Transit to travel and that a strike “will paralyze the vital arteries of transport in our regions.”
