LIRR strike: What happened between MTA, union negotiators, before deal fell apart

As the strike clock ticked toward the midnight deadline at Metropolitan Transportation Authority headquarters on Friday night, the Long Island Rail Road workers’ unions and MTA management still couldn’t get past what had long vexed negotiators: how to handle pay raises during the contract’s fourth year.

Unions representing electricians, locomotive engineers, signal inspectors, machinists and ticket clerks, who are now on strike, had wanted raises of 5% in that fourth year. The MTA had upped its offer from 3%, closer to the union's position, with a portion paid in a lump sum.

But to increase the pay, management negotiators late Friday had a new proposal: Unions would have to agree that new hires contribute more than the current 2% of base pay toward their health insurance. 

In exchange, according to an MTA source speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations, the workers would see their pay go up nearly 4.5%, a combination of a traditional pay raise and a lump-sum payment.

To the unions, it was an 11th-hour offer involving "an enormous contribution" for new hires to their medical benefits — an "unacceptable" change of course, Michael Sullivan, general chairman of the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, in an interview at Penn Station on Saturday.

MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber said in the early hours Saturday, "The new workers should pay a reasonable portion of healthcare costs," which, he said, would still be half what an average state worker pays.

"A big effort on our part to give them more cash, to give them more wage increases and also to be able to pay for it," he said outside MTA headquarters in lower Manhattan. "They rejected that. We don’t understand why."

The failed talks on Saturday led to the first LIRR strike since 1994, shutting the nation's busiest commuter rail, which carries 270,000 riders a day. In a preview of what's to come if the strike continues into the workweek, riders on Saturday faced hours-longer travels, cab rides costing hundreds of dollars and an outright inability to get to work or loved ones.

Sullivan said negotiations with the MTA were moving along before the last-minute offer "blew up" the talks.

"It was bizarre," Sullivan said. "We passed paper back and forth for 48 hours. It kinda felt like another more pass or two I thought we might’ve been there, and then it just stalled."

Lieber lamented that "we upped our proposals again and again and again" even as "the other side reciprocated little or not at all."

Giving the unions what they want would require fare increases as high as 8%, service cuts, layoffs or tax hikes, the MTA has said.

In the final days of the negotiations, the parties fought over whether to give money the unions were requesting for the fourth year as a traditional pay raise, as the unions sought, or as a lump-sum payment, as the MTA wanted.

"Our last offer literally gave the unions everything they said that they had wanted in terms of the pay and in exactly the way they said they wanted it, but they rejected even that," Lieber said.

The employees are already the highest-paid railroad workers in the nation, he said, earning a median annual income of about $136,000.

He said the MTA also offered to sign a deal for just the first three years of the contract and send the fourth year to binding arbitration; the unions, he said, refused.

Nick Peluso, national vice president for the Transportation Communications Union, said outside Penn Station Saturday morning the MTA’s shift in approach "almost provoked" the negotiations to break down.

Peluso declined to say the specific increase in medical contributions within the MTA’s offer but said it was "significant."

LIRR locomotive engineers' union chairman Gilman Lang said the two sides "were never close" on a deal.

In the final hour of negotiations, Lang said, the MTA's offer was "more egregious" than the previous lump-sum offer the agency put on the table in the days leading up to the strike.

Asked about these claims, MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said by email: "For the last few days, the MTA offered a series of proposals that provided all the money they claimed they needed to have. They rejected every one of those ideas and then complained that we came up with new ideas. That’s ridiculous." Donovan declined to say how much more the MTA wanted new hires to contribute.

As for who's at fault, Gov. Kathy Hochul, who effectively controls the MTA, blamed President Donald Trump's administration for cutting earlier mediation short. Trump posted Saturday that "I have NOTHING TO DO WITH IT — never even heard about it until this morning." Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive running against Hochul for governor, and whom Trump has endorsed, said that Hochul "failed."

After the LIRR unions called a strike Saturday morning, MTA leadership briefed Hochul on the negotiations and LIRR service, according to a statement from her office.

On Saturday night, the governor's office announced that Hochul would hold a press briefing on the strike Sunday morning, but provided no other details.

No future talks have been scheduled, Jamie Horwitz, a spokesman for the unions, told Newsday late Saturday night.

In the contract dispute that resulted in the strike, there is more at stake than just the costs of paying workers representing the five striking unions.

Under a process in labor relations called pattern bargaining, one union gains a superior contract, then another union cites those terms to demand similar or even better terms. And when a labor dispute goes to arbitration, the arbitrator will cite the contract terms elsewhere.

"That's the way pattern-bargaining works. Whatever you give at GM, they're gonna get at Ford and Chrysler down the road. Whatever you give the police, the fire are gonna want it too," said Arthur Wheaton, director of labor studies in the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. "There is a concern that it'll raise costs across the rest of the units for the MTA."

So, under pattern bargaining, the more the five striking unions get, the more other MTA unions — including the union representing 42,000 New York City subway and bus workers — will demand.