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 sheet rock.
“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.
Friday morning found more than a dozen engineers picketing outside Penn Station at W. 33rd St. and Seventh Ave., with signs that read “NJ Locomotive Engineers on Strike” and “Millions for Penthouse Views Nothing for Train Crews” — the latter a reference to NJ Transit’s brand-new $500 million headquarters building in Newark.
Meanwhile, 25 miles south at the Aberdeen-Matawan station on the North Jersey Coast Line, N.J. Gov. Phil Murphy held a presser with Kolluri, arguing that the engineers’ demands — and an expectation that other unions would want a similar raise — would bankrupt the railroad.
“This is not about not giving them a fair wage,” Kolluri said. “It’s about, how do you do it in a fiscally responsible manner that doesn’t bankrupt NJ Transit and put it in a death spiral?”
Kolluri and Murphy both said they were ready to come back to the table.
“Our doors are open,” the governor said. “We are ready to restart negotiations — literally this second.”
But BLET’s National President, Mark Wallace — who spoke to The News from the Penn Station picket line — claimed it was NJ Transit management that got up from the table in the first place.
“We’ve been six years in negotiations, we’ve been through a very long process under the railroad labor act,” Wallace said. “And then last night at 9:50 they chose to walk away from the table.”
“The deadline was 12:01 a.m.,” Wallace added. “If they get up at 9:50 and leave they’re telling you that they’re not interested in a deal.”
Still, Kolluri maintained the sides were close.
“If you look at this contract as a 100% deal, we’re 95% there,” he said.
Murphy, meanwhile, called the strike “a mess of [the union’s] own making” Friday, and “a slap in the face of every worker and commuter who relies on NJ Transit.”
But 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.”
Another waylaid rider, 23-year-old grad student Ambroise Dedenis, agreed.
“Of course I’m sympathetic,” he said.
Dedenis, who is studying sports management at Columbia University, said he’d crashed at a friend’s apartment last night and was trying to get home to the Garden State in time to coach a 4 p.m. soccer game.
“I am trying to get to New Jersey, to Summit, to go home,” he said. “But I guess not!”
Originally Published: May 16, 2025 at 10:20 AM EDT
