The Long Island Rail Road ground to a halt early Saturday morning after five unions representing roughly half the workforce walked off the job. The stoppage follows a breakdown in negotiations just before midnight Friday.
The crisis, decades in the making, is also an opportunity for Governor Kathy Hochul. She should use the strike to tackle long-standing problems on the LIRR and meaningfully improve the Empire State’s transit system.
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The LIRR, which ferries hundreds of thousands of people on a network spanning Manhattan to the easternmost ends of Long Island, was originally privately owned and served both freight and passengers. It came under federal jurisdiction when Congress passed the 1926 Railway Labor Act, which created processes for resolving labor disputes, so work stoppages wouldn’t disrupt interstate commerce.
Public employees in New York do not have the right to strike. The RLA, however, supersedes state law, effectively granting the railroad’s workers this right.
Much has changed over a century, and this exception should no longer apply. In 1966, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority absorbed the LIRR, making the railroad a public employer. In 1980, federal courts rejected an attempt to enforce New York’s strike prohibition, in part because the LIRR was still hauling freight at that time. It no longer does.
Nonetheless, the federal exemption has proved a powerful tool for the LIRR’s unions. Each time their labor contracts come up for negotiation, these groups threaten LIRR riders, and New York governors, with stoppages. They’ve carried out the threat before, most recently in 1987 and 1994.
Strike threats have enabled the unions to preserve and enhance a package of wages and benefits (including more generous health care than what state workers get). LIRR employees regularly rank as the nation’s highest-paid transit workers, a fact only partly attributable to the region’s higher cost of living.
Much of that pay comes in the form of overtime. More than 300 LIRR employees last year collected over $100,000 in OT—and 11 collected more than $200,000. Of the LIRR’s $1 billion 2025 payroll, 22 percent of it went to overtime. These figures reflect more than just hours worked: LIRR labor contracts grant “automatic overtime,” giving workers as much as an extra day’s pay if their duties require them, say, to operate both a diesel locomotive and an electric engine on the same shift.
These inefficiencies constrain how much service the LIRR can provide and influence how much revenue it needs, either from LIRR riders in the form of higher fares or from New York taxpayers.
Considering its major impact on the region, the strike is focused on what outsiders would consider small details. The LIRR’s contracts expired in 2023, and the railroad and the unions have agreed to retroactive raises covering three of the subsequent years, but the fourth year remained unresolved. LIRR management, ahead of the strike, stopped demanding work-rule changes. The main sticking point is not the amount but whether the last tranche of those raises would come as one-time lump-sum payments, as the LIRR wants, or permanent adjustments to the union wage scales, which the union demands.
That seemingly minor distinction is in fact hugely important. The current drama isn’t happening in a vacuum: changes to the LIRR wage scales will serve as the basis for changes sought by other MTA unions that can’t use strikes as leverage.
The largest one is Transportation Workers Union Local 100, which represents most New York City subway workers and is in talks already about its next contract. TWU International head John Samuelsen has been blasting Hochul, blaming her for causing the strike and encouraging the unions to picket at the LIRR’s emergency shuttle-bus stations. Samuelsen has tipped his hand, however, by explicitly complaining about how the LIRR’s financial offer is structured.
New York Republicans unfortunately have treated the strike as an opportunity to jab at the governor, continuing their time-honored tradition of using the MTA as a piñata instead of talking seriously about how state-imposed cost-drivers affect it (and contribute to Long Island’s high property taxes).
To her credit, Hochul is holding her ground on the side of riders and taxpayers, who together pay for any raises. Shortly after the strike began, she called out the LIRR unions for failing to bargain in good faith. Granting the LIRR union’s current demands, Hochul warned, would drive up fares by as much as 8 percent.
Hochul must press this case relentlessly until LIRR service resumes. She should educate the public about the unreasonable and inefficient work rules—like those preventing the LIRR from having its increasingly redundant ticket-window workers perform other work outside rush hour—that the unions refused to change in the four-year leadup to the strike.
Now that work has stopped, the LIRR has new flexibility to set the terms on which the unions return to work. If Hochul has the railroad’s back, then it can drop the most indefensible, and costly, work rules from whatever new contract comes together.
Hochul should meanwhile file a federal lawsuit reasserting the state’s Tenth Amendment rights against the Railway Labor Act. And she should empower the state Public Employment Relations Board to enforce the state’s anti-strike penalties.
Strikes are temporary. But ending the LIRR’s decades-old dysfunction will pay permanent dividends. Governor Hochul should use her platform to show New Yorkers why this strike should be the last one.