(CNN) – Negotiators for New Jersey Transit and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET), the union representing 450 striking engineers, have reached a tentative labor agreement that would bring an end to the three-day strike, according to the union.
New Jersey Transit did not have a comment on the union’s statement, but CEO Kris Kolluri and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy have scheduled a news conference for Sunday at 7:45 p.m. ET.
The engineers are due back at work on Monday. But a spokesman for NJ Transit, while not commenting on the settlement, said that the trains were not expected to run until Tuesday because of procedures that need to be followed before they can start rolling again. The union initially said the trains would be running on Monday.
Terms of the tentative deal were not immediately available. The agreement still needs to be ratified by the majority of rank-and-file members for the threat of a resumption of the strike to be put to rest. A previous vote on an earlier tentative agreement failed with 87% of members voting no.
The strike that started Friday has had the potential to greatly disrupt the work plans of around 100,000 regular customers of the nation’s third-largest commuter railroad, as well as businesses across the New York metropolitan region. It also had the potential to inconvenience fans of Beyoncé, who has five concerts beginning Thursday evening at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, just 10 miles from Midtown Manhattan.
“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, the head of the union’s unit that represents the NJ Transit engineers. “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 two sides had both said on Friday that they had been close to a deal to give engineers their first raise since 2019.
The union said they needed a deal that would bring them into parity with engineers at nearby rail systems, including Amtrak as well as commuter lines serving the Philadelphia market, the suburbs north of New York City and Long Island. They said they are losing too many members to those competing railroads without wage parity. The number of engineers at the railroad has fallen by 10% just since the start of the year, according to BLET.
But Murphy and Kolluri insisted that they wanted a contract that gave the engineers a fair wage hike. They said meeting the union’s wage demands would trigger “me too” clauses in the contracts of 14 other unions at the commuter service, which allow unions that have already reached labor deals with the railroad to see their pay raises increase to match whatever the engineers get in their deal.
Murphy and Kolluri insist that the agency could not afford to do that.
But BLET president Mark Wallace insisted the union had presented a way to give his members the wage increases they were demanding without triggering the “me too” clauses in the other union deals.
Railroads operate under an arcane century-old federal law, the Railway Labor Act, that controls labor relations at railroads and airlines, greatly limiting the union’s ability to go on strike. Even when members of a union reject a contract, as has happened in this case, they can be ordered to stay on the job and accept the terms of the deal through an act of Congress.
That’s what happened in December 2022, when Congress voted in favor of a deal rejected by the majority of the more than 100,000 union members who work at the nation’s four major freight railroads.
But Congress had shown no intention to act in the case of a single commuter railroad. While Congress has not allowed the nation’s freight railroads to strike for more than a few hours, there have been numerous commuter rail strikes that have stretched on for weeks, even months, without Congressional action.
Without Congress acting to end the strike, the state and New Jersey Transit were under pressure to reach a quick deal to get the engineers back to work and commuters back on trains.
Back in 1983, New Jersey Transit was on strike for one month. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority also went on strike in the 1980s for 108 days. Metro North, which is the commuter line serving the suburbs north of New York, was on strike for 42 days, and the Long Island Rail Road stopped for 11 days.
BLET’s Wallace said Friday the union hoped that Congress does not take any action this time.
“I hope their stance is they’re going to stay out of our fight,” he told CNN while on the picket line outside of New York’s Penn Station on Friday morning. “When two people get in a fight on the street, you walk by it.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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