NEWARK — This afternoon, May 18, the BLET and NJ Transit reached a tentative agreement, ending a strike that began Friday. Union members will return to work and trains will begin running on their regular schedules Tuesday, May 20. Terms of the agreement will be sent to the union’s 450 members who work as locomotive engineers or are trainees at the passenger railroad for their consideration. Contract language and dollar figures will be announced to the public later after BLET members have an opportunity to review. It was the first strike at NJ Transit in 42 years.
“While I won’t get into the exact details of the deal reached, I will say that the only real issue was wages and we were able to reach an agreement that boosts hourly pay beyond the proposal rejected by our members last month and beyond where we were when NJ Transit’s managers walked away from the table Thursday evening,” said Tom Haas, BLET’s General Chairman at NJ Transit. “We also were able to show management ways to boost engineers’ wages that will help NJT with retention and recruitment, without causing any significant budget issue or requiring a fare increase.”
The national union will begin to conduct a ratification vote by electronic ballot for the 450 BLET members eligible to vote. The agreement also requires a vote by the NJ Transit board at their next regularly scheduled meeting on June 11.
“Our members at NJ Transit had the full support of our national union, as well as the Teamsters. We also appreciated the outpouring of support we received from NJ Transit passengers and the labor community who know that NJ Transit’s locomotive engineers keep the trains moving and went years without a raise,” said BLET National President Mark Wallace.
Under the rules of the Railway Labor Act, the United States Congress could have intervened to delay or block the NJ Transit strike but chose not to intervene. “I want to thank members of Congress for allowing the process to work without interference. This should be a lesson for other railroad disputes. Nothing would have been gained by kicking the can down the road. Allowing strikes to happen encourages settlement rather than stonewalling,” Wallace added.
Before today, NJ Transit’s locomotive engineers were the lowest paid locomotive engineers working for a major commuter railroad in the nation, despite The New York City-Newark-Jersey City metro area being ranked among the least affordable areas in the United States. NJ Transit’s engineers have not had a new raise in the past five years, despite a significant rise in inflation.
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The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen represents 51,000 locomotive engineers and other train service workers at freight and passenger railroads across the United States. The union is a division of the Rail Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT).