The Long Island Rail Road won’t shut down for a worker strike this week after transit union leaders requested federal intervention requiring them to stay on the job until at least May.
Five unions representing roughly half of the LIRR’s workforce threatened to walk off the job as early as Thursday after talks broke down with the MTA. On Monday, the unions said their workers had voted to authorize a strike — but announced they had also requested President Donald Trump to convene an emergency board to broker a deal, which triggers a negotiating process that delays a strike for eight months.
Gilman Lang, the general chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, said he didn’t want to upend commutes on the nation’s busiest commuter railroad, which carries some 300,000 daily riders, especially with the Ryder Cup golf tournament set to begin next week on Long Island.
“ While the MTA is willing to use commuters to play a game of chicken with our unions, days before Long Island is to host an international event, we will continue being the adults in the room,” Lang said at a news conference Monday. “And we were, we refused to let New York State and the MTA embarrass our region on the world stage.
Lang said the unions’ vote to authorize a strike should “send an unmistakable message that our membership [is] unified, committed, and prepared to take all lawful actions necessary to secure a fair and reasonable contract.”
The unions noted they’ve been working without a new contract since 2022, when their last bargaining agreement with the MTA expired.
On Monday, they said they were requesting a 3% raise in the first year of the new contract, 3% in the second year, 3.5% in the third year, terms they said the MTA has agreed to.
But the workers also want a 6.5% raise in the final year of the deal, a number they said adjusts for inflation and the high cost of living.
“ This is not greedy. The MTA can afford it, and now it’s time for them to take care of their workforce,” Jim Sokolowski, vice general chairman of the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, said.
The MTA has publicly pushed back against several of their demands and blamed the unions for negotiating on strict work rules that, in some cases, give workers an extra day’s pay for completing relatively short tasks like moving a train within a yard.
“After months of radio silence, these outlier unions have finally admitted that they weren’t serious about negotiating. They never had a plan to resolve this at the bargaining table,” MTA spokesperson John McCarthy wrote in a statement after the unions announced their strike would be delayed. “If these unions wanted to put riders first, they would either settle or agree to binding arbitration. And if they don’t want to strike, they should say so – and finally show up to the negotiating table. This cynical delay serves no one.”
Under federal law, the workers could only go on strike next May if they reach an impasse with the MTA in a new round of negotiations.
“I don’t want to create an environment where they just kick the can down the road, ‘Well, we’ll find a better time to strike, but we’re going to strike,'” Gov. Kathy Hochul said during a news conference on Monday. “We have to get away from the strike language and the White House and others should use their power to say you’re not allowed to strike, work it out at the table.”
With a railroad strike averted, the nearly 300,000 daily LIRR riders can continue commuting into and out of New York City without disruption.
It avoids a repeat of a locomotive engineer strike in May that shut down NJ Transit’s commuter rail service for three days, throwing interstate commuting between the Garden State and New York into a frenzy.
