Strike du New Jersey Transit: negotiations resume a day earlier than expected

New Jersey’s transit leaders and the union representing its train drivers postponed the negotiations without concluding an agreement on Saturday, confirmed the second full day of the first state strike in 40 years, confirmed a spokesperson for the Transit Agency.

Kris Kolluri, general manager of the agency, entered into talks with representatives of the striking union, the brotherhood of locomotive engineers and trainmen, around 1 p.m. Saturday, a day earlier than expected, the agency said. The two parties postponed without agreement a few hours later. They plan to start discussions on Sunday.

“Today’s discussions continued to be constructive,” Kolluri said in a statement on Saturday afternoon. “We have mutually agreed to add official discussions for the day, but we will continue to speak and we are impatient to resume discussions tomorrow.”

The plans of the Saturday meeting met Friday evening, after the national president of the union asked for new negotiations. Sunday’s speech, which had already been planned, will include the National Mediation Board, the Federal Agency which coordinates labor relations in the railway and airline industries.

Earlier Saturday, at a press conference at Broad Street station in Newark, Kolluri said that the agency would meet the union throughout the weekend in the hope of reaching an agreement. “We are going to meet the union today, we will meet them tomorrow, all with this aim to reach an agreement so that we can put them back to work, get our customers with the reliable service they need,” he said.

A Union spokesperson said he was happy to return to the negotiating table. The union had pushed talks to resume before the scheduled Sunday meeting and had made several efforts to restart them since the start of the strike, he said.