Larry Higgs
March 11, 2016
NEWARK — NJ Transit officials and its rail unions have reached a tentative agreement on their long-simmering contract dispute, a day before a planned strike that threatened to paralyze the region.
No immediate details on the settlement were announced Friday night, or when union members might vote on the proposed accord, but for now commuters can breathe a deep sigh of relief. Gov. Chris Christie added there would be no immediate fare hike.
Union spokesman Stephen Burkert, who first announced a settlement had been reached, would not give any details.
"Thankfully for the commuters of NJ Transit, the crisis is averted," Burkert said. "We're going home to our families."
Speaking at press conference immediately afterward, Christie also would not get into details of the proposed settlement until union officials had a chance to review its points with membership.
"That's the appropriate thing to do," he told reporters.
Christie, who had been in Newark most of the day, said he had been confident there would be a settlement and called "all the hysteria" of the recent days "ginned up" by the media.
"These things," he said, "always come down to the end."
Christie called the deal, which will go through 2019, "fair and reasonable" for the unions and the taxpayers. "I'm pleased," he said. The governor added that he expected union ratification to happen in the immediate future.
Christie said he had been involved negotiations the past month and "very intensely in the last two weeks."
He also said there was never any feeling on either side of bad faith.
"Neither side here was spoiling for a fight," he remarked
While he said there would be no immediate fare increases, the governor added there was always a need for "periodic, responsible fare increases" in the future because salary and health benefit costs can only increase over time. He also urged future governors to keep making responsible increases.
With the tentative accord, NJ Transit riders on Monday can expect service as normal.
Commuters at Penn Station were relieved to hear the news as the Friday night rush hour was ending.
Mike Borik, 50, who lives in Scotch Plains, broke into a smile when he heard the strike had been averted.
"That's great. That's unbelievable," he said.
Richard Scott, 62, of Princeton Junction who works in the financial industry, said he was relieved.
"I was trying to work out some complicated strategies for next week that did not involve taking vacation," he said.
A strike would have affected 105,000 daily riders to New York who would have had limited options to get to work Monday, and would have cost businesses millions. The last NJ Transit strike was in March 1983. It lasted 34 days.
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The nation's third-largest commuter railroad system, NJ Transit had acknowledged that its contingency plans would only have been able to accommodate 38 percent of its riders on shuttle buses hired to run from five park and ride lots set up across the state. The remaining riders, nearly 65,000, would likely have funneled as many as 10,000 cars an hour onto roads within 25 miles of New York during morning and evening rush hours, officials had said, jamming them into the already congested Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, and George Washington Bridge.
Many commuters had talked of taking the week off, working from home, or finding hotels in New York.
The rail unions, representing 4,200 workers who have been on the job since 2011 without a new contract, threatened to walk out at midnight on Sunday over wages and how much employees pay in health insurance premiums.
Two emergency federal labor boards convened by President Obama over the last several months had favored the unions' proposals. In the most recent recommendation, the Presidential Emergency Board had recommended workers pay 2.5 percent of their straight time pay up to 40 hours a week toward their insurance premiums.
NJ Transit had rejected the proposal early in the negotiations, saying it came with a $183 million price tag. According to union officials, NJ Transit proposed to have employees pay 10 to 20 percent of their health insurance premiums, which they argued would wipe out any salary increase and was more than what workers at other commuter railroads pay.
The unions had been seeking an 18.4 percent pay raise over 6 ½ years, while the agency proposed a 10.9 percent raise over 7 ½ years.
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