The Long Island Rail Road strike of 2026 is over. The railroad, part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, is a New York state agency under the de facto control of Governor Kathy Hochul. For three-and-a-half days, five of the system’s unions refused to work until their contract demands were met.
The exact cost and details of the deal that brought the roughly 3,500 workers back on the job are not yet available, but so far, it seems Hochul can claim at least a modest victory.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
A peculiarity in federal law exempts the LIRR from New York’s ban on public-sector worker strikes. The exception means that the railroad’s workers, at least on paper, have the lawful right to walk off the job. They previously did so in 1987 and 1994.
The combination of taxpayer funding, the right to strike, and union control of an essential service has made contract negotiation virtually impossible for LIRR management. As a result, the LIRR operates under inefficient work rules that allow little flexibility and saddle the agency with huge overtime costs. The system still issues paper paychecks, for example, and more than 300 of its workers collected over $100,000 in overtime last year.
The LIRR’s contractually driven inefficiencies are so extreme that it’s been hard for observers to discern when certain abuses might be unlawful. The agency’s eyepopping overtime costs, for instance, helped conceal a massive time-theft ring.
The work stoppage posed two tests for Hochul. The first involved whether she was willing to risk a strike. She passed.
The LIRR unions had allowed negotiations to drag on for three years without giving ground on management’s long-sought changes to things like work rules that give employees an extra day’s pay for operating two types of trains in a single eight-hour shift.
The thorniness of the problem explains why standing up to the strike took some backbone. Threatened by a preelection walkout in 2014, Governor Andrew Cuomo capitulated to avert a strike. Hochul did not.
When the trains stopped, Hochul didn’t issue the usual pablum about how both sides needed to keep talking. She called the strike “reckless” and immediately began communicating about the facts, the stakes, and the public’s interest in seeing a settlement that favored LIRR management.
“These unions represent the highest paid workers of any railroad in the nation,” Hochul said Saturday morning, “yet they are demanding contracts that could raise fares as much as 8 percent, pit workers against one another, and risk tax hikes for Long Islanders.” That, she said, was “unacceptable.”
The Monday morning commute across the LIRR service territory was messy but hardly apocalyptic. At no point, at least publicly, did Hochul or MTA brass seem desperate for a deal.
Now that an agreement has been signed, Hochul faces her second test: the price that she will ask taxpayers and riders to pay for labor peace.
The exact details of the settlement aren’t yet public. Hochul, though, has indicated that LIRR management did not yield much ground. “We stood firm for a deal that would not require any additional fare increases or tax increases, period,” she said Monday. “Full stop. Got it done.”
Speaking Monday night, Hochul made a point to praise MTA chairman Janno Lieber—a vote of confidence that wouldn’t make sense if she’d just given away the store.
The MTA already plans to increase fares an average of 4 percent next year, following the 4 percent increase earlier this year. The LIRR and its unions have reportedly agreed to four rounds of raises, totaling 14.7 percent over just over four years, with a $3,000 lump-sum payment plus retroactive pay going back to 2023. The deal would run until roughly August 2027.
The fourth year of the deal features a 4.5 percent raise, considerably more than the 3 percent that the LIRR had offered. This figure is significant because it will serve as one of the starting points for the MTA’s other contract negotiations, including its biggest: the just-expired contract between the New York City Transit Authority and Transport Workers Union Local 100.
But the context is important. If the LIRR paid for part of this figure with concessions that chip away at its overtime or other costs elsewhere, that will serve the MTA well as a precedent and help the agency avoid getting clobbered if Local 100’s bus and subway worker contract goes to arbitration.
All in all, the threat of a work stoppage on the nation’s busiest transit system had the potential to be an election-year disaster for the MTA’s finances. For the moment, Hochul looks to have safely steered riders and taxpayers clear—at what full cost remains to be seen.
Still, the unions succeeded in preserving their almost cartoonish contract provisions, which constrain the LIRR’s ability to offer new or more frequent service. Until Congress (or the courts) carve taxpayer-funded commuter rail operations out of the now 100-year-old federal Railway Labor Act, the LIRR unions will have a weapon they can wield against New York’s riders, taxpayers—and governor.