With just hours left before a 12:01 a.m. strike deadline set by the NJ Transit local that represents the Garden State’s hundreds of train engineers, spokesmen for the union and NJ Transit management said talks were continuing Thursday.
“Negotiations between the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and NJ Transit managers, with the assistance of a mediator from the National Mediation Board, were held this morning in Newark and are expected to continue throughout the day,” BLET spokesman Jamie Horwitz told the Daily News in a statement.
“The strike by NJ Transit’s 450 engineers is scheduled to begin at 12:01 a.m. tomorrow, Friday, May 16 — if an agreement is not reached at the bargaining table today,” he added.
A spokesman for NJ Transit’s management said there were no updates to report Thursday afternoon, but confirmed that negotiations were ongoing.
The strike countdown comes after BLET membership voted overwhelmingly to reject a tentative agreement reached between NJ Transit and the union in March. Both sides say wages have been the sticking point.
BLET’s general chairman for the Garden State, Tom Haas, has said his members want wage parity with their colleagues who operate the trains for the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North.
NJ Transit President and CEO Kris Kolluri, however, says that would lead every other union involved with the train system to ask for similar raises, endangering NJ Transit’s financial future.
Currently, NJ Transit engineers’ hourly rate starts at $39.78 an hour — while their LIRR counterparts make $49.92 and Metro-North operators get $57.20 an hour.
Kolluri has said that the agreement rejected by BLET membership would have put the Jersey crews within spitting distance of those working the other side of the Hudson — at $49.82 an hour by the summer.
But Haas has said pay for the LIRR engineers — who are in the midst of their own contract negotiations — is likely to go up, and thus any pay parity with the Long Island engineers would be fleeting.
Should the engineers strike, BLET says its members will be on picket lines all across the NJ Transit rail network by 4 a.m. Friday.
