Six years of frustration and months of talks were made on Thursday at 9:50 p.m. when the leaders of NJ Transit moved away from the negotiating table with union leaders, preparing the path for the most consecutive transport strike of Garden State in more than 40 years.
The president and chief executive officer of NJ Transit, Kris Kolluri, said that the brotherhood of locomotive engineers and the Trainmen simply asked for a high increase that it would have put the railway in financial ruins.
“I finished the meeting by saying the following: you presented a proposal that seems right to you, but that does not solve our fundamental number of budget responsibility,” Kolluri said at a press conference on Friday morning. “It doesn’t seem to me as if I went in a breath and a breath, it looks like what reasonable people do.”
It has also raised concerns about what is called a “Me-Moi-Trop” clause in union contracts, which would give other transit unions proportional to all that engineers receive in their new contract.
Blet, the first vice-president Gary Best, who was at the negotiating table at New Jewark headquarters, said he was surprised when management left more than two hours before the deadline.
“We obtained our engineers where we thought they were to be. (NJ Transit) caused, say, 30 or 40 minutes,” said Best. “When they returned, they said that they could not accept our terms and that they had finished.”
The engineers left the position at 12:01 p.m. Friday, closing all the NJ Transit rail service.
The members of the National Mediation Board ordered both parties to return to the table for new negotiations on Sunday, which means that the strike will probably continue throughout the weekend.
The entire NJ transit section at Penn of Manhattan station was completed on Friday morning, without any entrant or outgoing trains. Confused commuters across New Jersey have channeled in alternative public transport methods, including bus coaches, ferries and the road train.
In a measure, the strike was ongoing months: union leaders reached a provisional contract agreement with NJ Transit in March, but members of around 450 members of the group elected it in April.
By another measure, the strike has been preparing for six years, because locomotive engineers have been without new contract since 2019.
“We have not had a salary increase in six years. All these other organizations have done so. So our locomotive engineers worked on COVVID, they worked in the worst inflationary period of my life, all without salary increase,” said national president of Blet Mark Wallace in a line of stakes in New York Penn Station.
Kolluri said that public transport workers “wanted a number of which we got closer to our negotiations” through a salary increase.
Bill Dwyer, professor at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, said that NJ Transit should have expected that other unions will seek to correspond to the new contract of locomotive engineers.
“They should have seen him coming,” he added. “The public is not satisfied with NJ Transit to start. This only aggravates their problems in terms of public image. ”
