NJ Transit engineers ratify new contract 

NJ Transit’s locomotive engineers ratified a contract after five years of negotiations and the first strike at the agency in more than 40 years, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen announced Tuesday.

Many details of the agreement, which union members approved in a 398-21 vote, remain unclear, but the union said it would bring engineer pay to more than $50 an hour and include a signing bonus.

“This agreement brings us close to what our peers make for doing the same type of work with the same levels of experience and training,” said Tom Haas, general chair of the NJ Transit union. “This agreement gives us the pay raises we needed, but also was done without a major hit to NJT’s budget and should not require a fare hike for passengers.”

The union’s ratification of the new contract means the likely end of the yearslong contract dispute. The NJ Transit board needs to approve the deal before it is finalized. The board was to meet on Wednesday morning.

NJ Transit CEO Kris Kolluri said in a statement that the new contract balances “fair compensation with budgetary discipline.”

“We adhered to the established bargaining pattern and, through constructive negotiations, secured meaningful concessions that enabled us to fund the wage increases sought by BLET members without exceeding our current budget,” Kolluri said.

The union and NJ Transit committed to a deal in March but the union’s members overwhelmingly rejected it, setting the stage for last month’s disruptive strike.

Locomotive engineers had sought larger pay raises than were offered to the agency’s other unions under a process called pattern bargaining, where different unions are offered contracts with identical terms. Members of the train engineers union, they said, were paid less than locomotive engineers at other rail lines in the region.

The agency resisted, warning larger increases would trigger provisions in existing collective bargaining agreements — so-called “me, too” provisions — and guarantee equivalent raises to most of NJ Transit’s 14 other unions.

Late in the bargaining process, Haas said engineers offered concessions on health care benefits and work rules that would allow larger raises without triggering those clauses. The union never detailed those proposals publicly, and it’s not clear whether they are included in the ratified agreement.

It was not immediately clear whether other unions would seek to enforce “me, too” provisions.

Because rail strikes can significantly disrupt interstate commerce, they are heavily regulated at the federal level, and workers in that industry must go through extensive mediation processes before they can launch a job action.

For the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, that process included years before the National Mediation Board, two presidential emergency boards and years of direct negotiation.

The engineer strike last month entirely stopped NJ Transit trains for four days, forcing the agency to increase bus service to transport roughly one-fifth of the agency’s rail riders at a cost of about $4 million each day.