Talks aimed at settling a strike between train engineers and New Jersey's huge commuter railroad resumed Saturday and are set to continue Sunday, New Jersey Transit CEO Kris Kolluri said.
The locomotive engineers' strike began Friday at the rail system with 350,000 daily riders and left commuters either working from home or searching for other ways to travel across the state or over the Hudson River to New York City.
Kolluri spoke Saturday at Newark's Broad Street Station, saying the agency is preparing for the workweek commute by “surging” buses to help commuters at train stations. But he cautioned that the buses can't handle the entire volume of the commuter rail system.
Kolluri said he and Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen President Mark Wallace spoke and agreed to meet Saturday. It had been uncertain whether the two sides would meet ahead of a National Mediation Board meeting already set for Sunday.
Late Saturday afternoon, Kolluri said in a statement that the talks were constructive and had ended for the day.
“Today’s discussions continued to be constructive. We’ve mutually agreed to adjourn formal discussions for the day but will continue talking and look forward to resuming discussions tomorrow," Kolluri said.
Wallace said he had hopes for a deal with the resumption of negotiations, which had ended shortly before the strike Thursday night.
“If we come out together, we’ll have a deal,” Wallace said.
NJ Transit has a train yard, just over the Delaware River from Trenton in the suburban Philadelphia town of Morrisville. Picketers in red shirts that said “United We Bargain Divided We Beg” carried signs and blared music not far from the yard there on Saturday.
Bill Craven, a 25-year veteran engineer, described the mood among union members positively. He said they usually don't get to congregate because they are typically passing each other on the rails at 100 mph.
“Most of us would much rather be running trains. That's what we do for a living. We don't want to disrupt our lives, other people's lives, but it comes to a point where we haven't had a raise in six years,” he said.
The walkout comes after the latest round of negotiations on Thursday didn’t produce an agreement. It is the state’s first transit strike in more than 40 years and comes a month after union members overwhelmingly rejected a labor agreement with management.
Wallace walked the picket line Friday outside New York City’s Penn Station. He said the engineers are committed to staying on strike until they get a fair deal. Union members were nearly unanimous in authorizing a strike last summer, and 87% of them rejected the latest agreement.
Wallace said NJ Transit needs to pay engineers a wage that is comparable to Amtrak and Long Island Railroad because engineers are leaving for jobs on those other railroads for better pay,
The union has seen steady attrition in its ranks at NJ Transit as more members leave to take better-paying jobs at other railroads. The number of NJ Transit engineers has shrunk from 500 several months ago to about 400. The engineers are responsible for operating trains, ensuring safe and smooth transport between stations,
New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy said Friday that it is important to “reach a final deal that is both fair to employees and at the same time affordable to New Jersey’s commuters and taxpayers.”
NJ Transit is the nation’s third-largest transit system and operates buses and rail in the state, providing nearly 1 million weekday trips, including into New York City. The walkout halts all NJ Transit commuter trains, which provide heavily used public transit routes between Penn Station on one side of the Hudson River and communities in northern New Jersey on the other, as well as the Newark airport, which has grappled with unrelated delays of its own recently.
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