For three days in May, the busiest commuter railroad in the country simply stopped. The Long Island Rail Road strike began at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, May 16, knocked out service for roughly 300,000 daily riders, and turned a normal week into a scramble of shuttle buses, packed subway transfers and a lot of people suddenly working from home.
The walkout pitted five unions representing about 3,500 LIRR workers against the MTA, and the fight was about the things that quietly grind down transit workers: pay and healthcare. Talks had stalled over raises and work rules, and according to reporting by Gothamist the MTA introduced healthcare-cost changes for new workers late in the negotiations, which did not help.
It ended with the workers getting paid. The tentative deal became a four-year contract with annual raises of 3, 3, 3.5 and 4.5 percent in the final year, plus a $3,000 lump sum and full retroactive pay. And here is the part riders will appreciate: Governor Kathy Hochul and the MTA said the agreement would not raise fares or taxes. A complete shutdown of the regional rail network resolved with the workers winning real money and commuters paying nothing extra for it.
Service did not snap back all at once. The railroad first restored the four electrified branches, Babylon, Huntington, Port Washington and Ronkonkoma, before bringing every branch back to a normal weekday schedule by 4 p.m. that Tuesday.
For New York City riders, the strike was a reminder of how much of the region runs on a railroad most Brooklynites never set foot on, and how fast a labor dispute three counties away can land on everyone else’s commute. The reverse-commuters, the hourly workers who cannot log on from home, and the small businesses inside the stations took the disruption while the deal got hammered out.
The contract still has to be ratified by the union memberships, the standard last step that turns a tentative agreement into a binding one. If you ride the LIRR, the move now is to sign up for the MTA’s service alerts for your branch, the same lesson the G train teaches every time the schedule changes: the railroad will tell you before the platform does, if you let it.
Featured image: Union Turnpike / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
