Date: 2025-08-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028531
NEW JERSEY
NJ RAIL TRANSIT
New Jersey Transit and Engineers’ Union Agree to Deal to End Strike
The agency said its trains would start running again on Tuesday morning.
NJ RAIL TRANSIT
New Jersey Transit and Engineers’ Union Agree to Deal to End Strike
The agency said its trains would start running again on Tuesday morning.
Kris Kolluri stands at a lectern with Gov. Phil. Murphy next to him.
Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/nyregion/new-jersey-transit-strike-agreement.html
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Sadly, accounting and financial reporting has not progressed mush since the early Victorian era and the early days of the industrial revolution.
Modern economic productivity is very impressive, but its value way lower than it could be should it be better organized.
I am struck by the rather negative trends that have dominated the modern economy since the early 1990s. While productivity has improved massively over this time, very little of that productivity has been of any value to the majority of people ... not only Americans but everyone. Most of the benefit has accrued to a very few exxtremely rich and powerful individuals and the companies they own and control!
I see the need for a very much improved way of doing decision making analysis in the modern socio-emviro-economic system. The modern world is using an archaic framing of analysis that makes optimum decisions very difficult to make.
Transportation in the USA is very much a case in point ... and very much in evidence during this recent New Jersey rail transit strike!
Peter Burgess
The agency said its trains would start running again on Tuesday morning.
Kris Kolluri, the chief executive of NJ Transit, said it would take a day to conduct safety inspections and inspect tracks before service could resume.
Written by Patrick McGeehan
May 18, 2025 ... Updated 9:11 p.m. ET
An agreement was reached on Sunday to end New Jersey’s first statewide transit strike in more than 40 years just three days after it started, New Jersey Transit and a union spokesman said.
The union that represents the state’s passenger-train drivers, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, said it called off the strike at about 6 p.m., and NJ Transit said its trains would begin running a full schedule again on Tuesday morning.
Kris Kolluri, the chief executive of NJ Transit, said it would take a day to conduct safety inspections and inspect tracks before service could resume.
For Monday, the agency said, it would rely on its original strike contingency plan involving chartered buses running from four satellite locations into New York City or to stations on the PATH commuter train service. v “The sound that you probably hear is the sound of our state’s commuters breathing a collective sigh of relief, said Gov. Philip D. Murphy, who announced the agreement at a news conference on Sunday night.
“If both employers and employees could please give us one more day of work from home, that would be a huge, huge boost,” Mr. Murphy said. State officials had asked commuters to work from home during the strike if their presence in the workplace was not considered essential.
Mr. Murphy declined to provide any details of the tentative agreement but said it was “fair to NJ Transit’s employees while also being affordable for our state’s commuters and taxpayers.”
The main sticking point had been the engineers’ demand that they be paid on par with their counterparts who drive trains for other passenger railroads, including Amtrak and New York’s commuter railroads. Mr. Kolluri implied that the agreement involved some concessions by the engineers on work rules that would help cover the cost of the raises they sought.
He did not say how much the strike had cost the agency, but he had estimated that it would cost about $4 million per day.
“It is now the union’s job to go back and brief their members and put the agreement up for ratification,” Mr. Kolluri said.
The engineers had already voted down a previous agreement Mr. Kolluri had reached with the leaders of their union. But Mr. Murphy said he had “a high degree of confidence” that the engineers would find the new terms acceptable.
The engineers walked out at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, bringing New Jersey’s network of commuter train lines to a halt and leaving thousands of commuters scrambling to find other ways of getting to work. NJ Transit, which operates the nation’s third-largest commuter railroad, said it carried about 350,000 passengers per day, including about 70,000 who ride its trains into Manhattan on a typical weekday.
The engineers’ union had been holding out for a new contract for more than five years and was the only one of 15 unions that represent NJ Transit rail employees that had not come to terms with the agency in recent years.
Mr. Kolluri had implored customers to work from home during the strike if possible because the chartered buses would only be able to accommodate about one-fifth of the usual New York-bound train riders. Some large companies agreed to allow employees to work from home during the strike if their presence in the workplace was not considered essential.
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