LIRR work rule talks welcome

Just weeks after five Long Island Rail Road unions halted train service across the region demanding higher pay, newly released data shows that 328 LIRR workers earned more than $100,000

in overtime in 2025. That represents more than 40% of all the Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers who earned six figures of overtime work.

The MTA spent a staggering $1.46 billion on overtime in 2025, according to the report by the Empire Center for Public Policy.

After years of overtime costs plaguing the authority and the LIRR specifically, none of that is a surprise. But it is particularly damning after nearly half of the LIRR’s unions battled for a wage package that didn’t follow the pattern of other railroad unions. Their resulting strike hurt LIRR commuters and local small businesses, and resulted in a pay package that wasn’t much different from what they could have gotten before the strike.

In the end, those negotiations didn’t address one of the most critical issues: the unions’ lucrative and antiquated work rules, which are partly to blame for boosting pay and overtime.

Among the most significant: a rule that allows locomotive engineers to earn an extra day’s pay just by flipping a switch so an LIRR train can move from electric territory to diesel, to accommodate the eastern parts of the system that aren’t yet electrified.

But shortly after 2025’s overtime data was released last month, as the MTA Board ratified the new contract that emerged from the strike, officials with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen wrote to the MTA suggesting they’d be open to “further negotiations” focused on the electric-diesel work rule.

Union officials previously had said they didn’t want the work rules to be part of the contract bargaining process. That was disappointing, but any conversation that might result in changes to the rules is for the better, especially if it can impact the next round of contract talks. The fact that union officials are now willing to talk work rules reflects in part their understanding of a changing landscape, where a changing fleet likely will make such pay boosts more rare and less necessary. But their change of tune also likely reflects their recognition that the work rule had become an oft-criticized symbol of the problems with LIRR union contracts during the negotiations and strike.

The MTA must take advantage of this opportunity, and keep the spotlight on the absurd work rules that cost the authority, its riders and the state’s taxpayers so much extra money. That should go beyond the diesel-electric rule; there are others that must come to an end, too.

Union officials are right to finally steer this discussion forward. Now, the MTA and the unions must make sure that those old and expensive work rules reach the end of their line.