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For the first time since 1983, New Jersey Transit has a train engineers’ strike on its hands. Approximately 350,000 commuters were affected when engineers walked off the job in the early hours of Friday morning. The union has not had a contract or raise since 2019, and reports indicated that the sides were close to an agreement before New Jersey Transit reportedly walked away from the table around two hours before the midnight deadline. So, how close were they, and more importantly, how long will the strike cripple the daily commute for New Jersey’s train riders? Michael Smart is an associate professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to offer his theory on why the “fairly unprecedented” strike might last a while.
“I’m not terribly optimistic that this will be settled too quickly,” Smart told host Larry Mendte. “The back-and-forth between management and labor on this has been more public than is typical for this kind of labor negotiation. There’s a lot of bad blood and I’m not sure...at what happened last night, but it doesn’t sound good, whatever it was, so I don’t think that we’re much closer today than yesterday… My gut on this is that we’re not hours away from a settlement, but a bit more than that.”
Still, Smith feels the economic pressures on both sides will force management and labor to resolve the issues before the strike does long-term damage to the economy. “The last strike took almost a month. I really don’t think we’re going to see something like that happen. I think there’s too much pressure and both sides have too much to lose to let something drag on for a month this time around.”
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