Some 3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers walked off the job just after midnight Saturday morning — the first strike on the nation’s busiest commuter railroad since 1994 — after contract talks with the MTA failed to yield a deal.
The strike is expected to be a nightmare for the 300,000 commuters who rely on LIRR trains to get them in and out of NYC each day. A contingency plan relying heavily on shuttle buses is in place, but MTA officials admit it will not come close to moving the number of people who rely on the trains.
Gov. Hochul called on both sides to return to the bargaining table and hammer out an agreement.
“I believe a deal can be done and I urge both the MTA and these unions to return to the table and bargain non-stop until a deal is reached,” she said in a statement.
Any trains that were in passenger service at midnight were expected to continue their run and get passengers to their destination. The last scheduled train was a 11:58 p.m. westbound train from West Hempstead to Jamaica.
Then the railroad will go silent — the first time a strike has stopped the Long Island Rail Road in 32 years, when rail workers walked off the job for two days.
Gilman Lang, General Chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, indicated in a statement early Saturday morning that this strike could stretch longer.
“This is an open-ended strike,” he said “We don’t know when it will end.”
A spokesman for the labor coalition said picket lines were already forming at Penn Station and the Ronkonkoma LIRR station, with other pickets likely as the day went on.
In her statement, Hochul called the strike “reckless,” saying it would endanger progress made by the railroad.
“These unions represent the highest paid workers of any railroad in the nation, yet they are demanding contracts that could raise fares as much as 8%, pit workers against one another, and risk tax hikes for Long Islanders,” she said.
MTA head Janno Lieber said in a statement that the contract talks made it clear to him that “these unions always intended to strike.”
“Their strategy is to inconvenience Long Islanders and try to force the MTA and the state to do a bad deal,” he said.
Lieber said the MTA in its last offer “literally gave them everything they said they wanted in terms of pay but they rejected even that.”
“We cannot and will not do a deal that shifts huge costs to our riders by forcing fare hikes,” Lieber said. “And we can’t expect taxpayers to foot a big new bill. They’re already doing enough. It’s no secret that the Long Island Rail Road is the most highly subsidized operation at the MTA.”
An MTA contingency plan, which will ferry passengers by bus between several train stations on Long Island and several subway stations in Queens, goes into effect on Monday.
But those shuttle buses will only operate on weekdays, and only during the morning and evening rush hours — between 4:30 a.m. and 9:00 a.m., and between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. The buses are also only estimated to be able to carry some 26,000 passengers a day — a far cry from the 300,000 the LIRR carries on a typical workday.
Saturday’s strike comes after more than two years of contract negotiations, two federal mediation boards, and — most recently — two weeks of talks that failed to find common ground on the lone outstanding issue: how much the members of five LIRR trade unions can expect to be paid.
Both sides ultimately found their way to an agreement on back-pay, with a hand-shake agreement to retroactively raise wages by 3% for 2023, 3% for 2024, and 3.5% for 2025.
But the labor consortium — made up of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and the Transportation Communications Union — demanded a 5% raise for 2026, which they said was necessary to keep up with inflation.
After initially refusing to go above 3% without further concessions from the unions on overtime work rules, MTA leadership ultimately offered the unions 3% plus a lump sum payment for the difference between a 3% raise and one year of pay at 4.5%.
The unions — negotiating a contract that was already three years behind schedule — argued that such a lump sum would only cover one year, regardless of how long a future contract took to negotiate.
And for roughly a week — despite negotiations running down to the wire Friday night — neither side moved.
And now, with the LIRR on strike, no one is moving.