NJ Transit engineers will strike at midnight: union

Evan Simko-Bednarski, New York Daily News on May 15, 2025

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NJ Transit’s 450 train engineers will be on strike as of 12:01 a.m., the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen said late Thursday night, after talks in Newark failed to resolve a dispute over wages.

With just an hour left before a 12:01 a.m. strike deadline, NJ Transit management and the union that represents 450 train engineers were still without a deal, Garden State Gov. Phil Murphy told reporters Thursday night.

Asked whether that meant a strike was imminent, Murphy said the deadline was set by the BLET.

“That’s their call,” Murphy said of a strike. “That’s entirely their decision.”

Jamie Horwitz, a spokesman for the union, told The New York Daily News late Thursday that the engineers would indeed be walking off the job at 12:01 a.m.

NJ Transit head Kris Kolluri said Thursday that he felt there was still room to negotiate.

“A few hours ago, maybe a few minutes ago, [I] thought we actually got pretty close (to a deal),” Kolluri said shortly before 11 p.m.

“This is not a lost cause, this is an imminently achievable deal,” Kolluri said. “I am not leaving the negotiating table.”

“If they’re willing to meet tonight I’ll meet them again tonight,” he said.

Kolluri and Murphy said the National Mediation Board had reached out to both sides to continue negotiations on Sunday. It was not immediately clear whether the BLET would agree to continue talks.

“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 Thursday morning in Newark and are expected to continue throughout the day,” BLET spokesman Jamie Horwitz said earlier in the day.

“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.

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.

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.

“There is no point in providing a compensation structure to a group of my colleagues which ultimately ends up bankrupting the agency,” he said Thursday night.

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.