New York City residents who plan to spend Memorial Day weekend on the South Fork were breathing easier as of Monday night, when a strike called by a coalition of five Long Island Rail Road unions was settled. Trains will run Thursday, Friday, and through the holiday weekend.
The end of the brief strike also meant resumption of South Fork Commuter Connection service, L.I.R.R. trains that take passengers from Speonk to points east in the morning and back in the afternoon.
Service on the L.I.R.R.’s Montauk branch resumed on Tuesday afternoon after a three-day disruption, as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns and operates the L.I.R.R., and the coalition, which collectively comprises more than half of the railroad’s employees, came to a contract agreement.
Gov. Kathy Hochul spoke about the settlement on Monday night. “Negotiations are rarely easy,” she said, “but I have a lot of respect for the collective bargaining process that unfolded over the last few days. And I always believed that we could reach a good, fair compromise, a contract that achieved two principles: Number one, protecting affordability for Long Islanders and commuters while giving fair wages to the employees. And by working and negotiating together, we have reached that kind of deal.”
The contract, the governor said, “will ensure that 3,500 Long Island Rail Road employees will be paid fairly for their labor.”
The M.T.A. and the coalition of unions, which had been without a contract since 2022, were in agreement on retroactive general wage increases of 3 percent in June 2023 and June 2024, and 3.5 percent in June 2025, over the wages then in effect. The parties were stuck on a wage increase for 2026, however, the M.T.A. offering a 3-percent general wage increase for 2026 and the five unions requesting a 5-percent increase. After failing to reach an agreement on May 15, the strike deadline arrived just after midnight on Saturday and the trains came to a halt.
The coalition’s proposed wage increases would set a new pattern for 2026, ahead of any other union agreement, according to the M.T.A., and “wage increases above budget have implications for the M.T.A., state, and city budgets.” Those implications were fare increases, service cutbacks, or both. M.T.A. officials also worried aloud about precedent, as the entity negotiates with scores of other unions.
Details of the settlement were scant on Tuesday afternoon. A spokesman for the coalition of unions who asked not to be named said that it would not issue a statement immediately, as its focus was on educating members about the agreement. The agreement, he added, still had to be ratified by the five unions, and there is “always a chance that these agreements will not be ratified by one or more unions.”
Adam Fine, the superintendent of the East Hampton School District, told The Star on Tuesday that the district had “sent a bus home with a driver on May 15. We had our staff sign up ahead of time. We had stops at Westhampton and Hampton Bays.” Thirty to 35 staff members took the bus on Monday, he said, and around 20 more took it on Tuesday morning. The Monday morning commute was “acceptable,” according to a report given him, Mr. Fine said, but the evening commute west was “tough” because of an accident on Montauk Highway in East Hampton. On Tuesday morning the bus “also got caught in significant traffic,” he said.
Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez said at Tuesday’s meeting of the town board that the agreement “is welcome news for East Hampton because the disruption has had a real impact here,” a reference to the South Fork Commuter Connection, which, “in April alone . . . carried more than 2,100 passengers over 22 service days, helping workers get between train stations and schools, government offices, retail stores, private offices, and other workplaces.”
The strike, she said, “just demonstrated how much our community and our town government depends on reliable public transportation, as we had a number of folks battling the traffic and others working remotely from home.”
