New Yorkers looking to make a reverse commute into the Garden State were flummoxed on Friday, hours after NJ Transit’s 450 engineers went on strike in the early morning hours over a long-running wage dispute.
“When I got here this morning I walked over there and I noticed the screens were blank. There were no trains listed,” a man who identified himself as Victory told the Daily News.
“I’m stuck, I need to go to Trenton,” he said.
The 63-year-old Crown Heights construction worker said he’d been commuting to a job site in New Jersey about four or five days a week, painting and installing sheetrock.
“I went to the Amtrak to try to see if I can get it to get to work,” Victory continued. “But when I went to the ticket booth, the guy told me that the ticket was $108 — and I only have $70 in my wallet.”
Money — specifically the hourly wage for the engineers who make the nation’s third largest commuter rail network run — is at the center of the labor dispute that came to a head Thursday night as talks stalled and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen called the strike they first voted to authorize in August 2023.
Last week, BLET’s general chairman, Tom Haas, said the dispute had come down to one thing: wage disparity between his members and their colleagues across the river at the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North.
“The only sticking point of this contract we have is wages,” he told reporters last Friday. “We have sought nothing more than equal pay for equal work.”
Emma Seiwell / New York Daily News
Crown Heights resident Victory, 63, looks at an empty section of Penn Station as he tries to find a way to get to the Trenton construction site where he works on Friday morning. (Emma Seiwell / New York Daily News)
NJ Transit engineers’ hourly rate starts at $39.78 an hour — less than their LIRR counterparts, who make $49.92, as well as the engineers of Metro-North, who make $57.20.
But NJ Transit boss Kris Kolluri has said he offered a raise that would have seen the BLET members make $49.82 an hour by the summer.
That offer led to a tentative agreement earlier this spring that looked briefly to have averted NJ Transit’s first rail strike in 40 years. The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by 87% of BLET membership, however.
Asked about that last week, Haas said pay for the LIRR engineers — who are in the midst of their own contract negotiations — is likely to go up, and therefore any pay parity with the Long Island train crews would be fleeting.
An intensive round of talks Thursday failed to find common ground, and shortly before midnight the engineers announced their intention to strike.
Victory, the construction worker left stranded at Penn, said he bore the engineers no ill-will.
“It’s their prerogative,” he said of the strike. “It’s their right.”
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