(Actually, It Hasn’t. That’s the Point.)
On strikes, suits, and the spectacular theatre of people who absolutely could have sorted this out months ago
Personally, I think, there is something almost poetically American about the Long Island Rail Road strike. Not because it’s dramatic, though it is. Not because it’s chaotic, though it will be. But because 250,000 people are currently standing on platforms staring at departure boards that read “No Passengers” like some kind of post-apocalyptic art installation, and somewhere in a room with very expensive chairs, two groups of grown adults are pointing at each other and saying “it’s their fault.”
Welcome to May 2026. The trains have stopped. The excuses have not.
A Brief History of Absolutely Seeing This Coming
Let me set the scene for you.
The Long Island Rail Road… North America’s busiest commuter rail system, carrying around 250,000 people every single weekday between the suburbs of Long Island and the great, grinding beast that is New York City. It is not a luxury. It is not a lifestyle choice. It is the circulatory system of an entire region. Without it, people don’t get to work. Nurses don’t get to hospitals. Teachers don’t get to schools. Accountants don’t get to… well, wherever accountants go.
The unions and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority have been “negotiating for months.” Months. The issues on the table? Workers’ salaries and healthcare premiums. Bread and butter stuff. The kind of thing that, in a functional world, gets resolved over a few uncomfortable Tuesday afternoons with a mediator and some bad coffee.
But this is not a functional world. This is New York politics. So instead, what we got was months of talks, a September near-miss averted only when the Trump administration swept in like a rescue helicopter that then immediately ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea, a 60-day extension that both sides apparently used to perfect their mutually assured disappointment, and then… at precisely 12:01 a.m. on Saturday the 16th of May, the whole thing went dark.
The trains stopped. The picket signs came out. And somewhere on Penn Station’s gleaming floor, 250,000 futures quietly rerouted themselves onto the Long Island Expressway.
The Blame Game, Presented Without Irony (But With Plenty of Mine)
Here is where it gets truly magnificent.
Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who is also, as it happens, up for re-election later this year (what timing, what extraordinary timing), stepped forward to explain that this was entirely the fault of the Trump administration for “cutting mediation short.” Which is fair enough, as criticisms go. Mediation being cut short is a real thing that causes real problems.
Donald Trump, in the considered, measured manner for which he is internationally renowned, responded on Truth Social that he “never even heard about it until this morning.”
He. Never. Even. Heard. About. It.
North America’s largest commuter rail system… a crisis months in the making, a 60-day clock ticking down in full public view, five unions, thousands of workers, hundreds of thousands of commuters… and the President of the United States woke up on Saturday, scrolled his feed, and went: “huh, that’s new.”
He then, in the same post, offered to personally solve it. “If you can’t solve it, let me know, and I’ll show you how to properly get things done.” Bold words from a man who apparently needed a push notification to find out it existed.
Meanwhile, Hochul had previously… and I want to be fair to her here, I really do… described the unions’ demands as “greedy asks” that threatened to “destabilise the local economy.” This is the same governor now wringing her hands publicly about the devastation of the strike. Which is a position not entirely unlike complaining about the rain after spending months refusing to fix the roof.
The People Holding the Placards
Now, look. I want to talk about the workers. Because this is where satire has to briefly sit down and let something more honest take over.
Duane O’Connor, one of the picketers, put it plainly: “I feel terrible. Terrible. This is going to hurt… they think they can push us around and we’re supposed to just fall in line. All we are asking for is fair wages.”
He’s right, you know. The contract dispute stretches back three years. Three years during which inflation did its absolute worst to everybody… particularly to people who aren’t in a position to quietly pocket a bonus or renegotiate their consulting rate. Locomotive engineers, machinists, signalmen. The people who actually make the thing go. The people whose labour, funnily enough, is why 250,000 commuters were able to get to work at all yesterday.
The MTA chairman, Janno Lieber, says the agency “gave the union everything they said they wanted in terms of pay.” The union says that’s not quite how the maths works out, particularly when you factor in healthcare premiums chewing through whatever wage increases were on offer. Both cannot be entirely right. Only one of them is holding a placard in the rain.
And then there’s the voice of the put-upon commuter, Rob Udle, an electrician… a union member himself, notably… who told reporters: “they shouldn’t hold everybody hostage to do it. There’s a better way.”
He’s not wrong either. But I’d gently suggest that if there had been a better way available, someone might have found it in the preceding twelve months of negotiations. The strike is not the workers’ preferred outcome. Nobody wakes up and thinks “do you know what would be great? Standing outside Penn Station with a sign while my mortgage doesn’t pause itself.” A strike is what you do when the conversation has run out of road. Rather like, in a darkly ironic way, the commuters themselves.
The Contingency Plan (Bless Its Cotton Socks)
The MTA, to their credit, prepared a contingency plan. Free shuttle buses, connecting key LIRR stations to the subway system. It was described, by the MTA themselves, as only capable of handling “a fraction of normal ridership.”
To translate: they built a garden hose to handle a river.
Governor Hochul urged Long Islanders to “work from home if possible.” Lisa Daglian, from the commuter advocacy group with the magnificent name Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, pointed out what should have been obvious to anyone who gave it thirty seconds of thought: “You work in construction, you work in the healthcare industry, you work at a school or you’re about to graduate from school… people need to get where they need to go.”
Yes. Yes they do. Profound stuff. The kind of insight that perhaps could have injected a little urgency into those months of negotiations before 12:01 a.m. rendered it moot.
The weekend strike also, as a beautiful bonus, collided spectacularly with the Yankees-Mets crosstown series and the Knicks’ playoff run at Madison Square Garden… both venues having dedicated LIRR stops. So it’s not just the nurses and the schoolteachers navigating the chaos. It’s also fifty thousand people in replica jerseys trying to work out whether the F train goes anywhere near their seats.
New York, honestly. Never just one disaster at a time.
What This Is Really About
Strip away the press releases and the Truth Social posts and the “we’re far apart at this point” statements, and what you have is something very simple and very old.
People who do essential work want to be paid fairly for it. The cost of living has gone up. Their contracts haven’t kept pace. They tried talking. The talking didn’t work. So they stopped the trains.
On the other side, you have a public agency managing a system that is genuinely strapped for cash, facing the impossible geometry of: raise fares to fund worker pay, which hurts the very commuters you exist to serve, or hold the line on worker pay, which eventually produces… well, this.
And threading the whole thing is the political dimension… a governor facing re-election, a president who apparently reads about infrastructure crises the same way the rest of us read about them, and a labour relations expert at Rutgers who summed up the entire situation with the kind of clarity that only comes from watching it happen before: “She’s up for reelection, and Long Island is a critical vote for her. So if there’s a significant fare hike, that does not bode well for her on Election Day.”
Ah. There it is. The invisible hand, making its presence felt not in the market, but in the margins of a ballot paper.
The Departure Board Says “No Passengers”
I keep coming back to that image. The departure boards at Penn Station, normally a rolling cascade of destinations and platform numbers and the particular low-grade stress of nearly-missing-your-train, instead reading: “No Passengers.”
Ghost trains going nowhere. A system in suspension. Police officers redirecting people who have done nothing wrong, away from platforms they’ve stood on a thousand times, toward a shuttle bus that was never built to carry them.
Somewhere in the building, I imagine, the coffee shop is still open. Some things are too fundamental to stop.
The negotiations are expected to resume. The pressure is described as immense. A Monday morning rush hour without the LIRR running is the kind of thing that tends to concentrate minds wonderfully… particularly the minds of politicians who need Long Island to like them in November.
Let’s hope they find the urgency they apparently couldn’t locate for the past several months.
In the meantime, 250,000 people are working out how to get to work. Nurses are calculating alternate routes to hospitals. Teachers are checking bus times. An accountant named Rich Piccola is staring at the Long Island Expressway and contemplating his choices.
And somewhere, a locomotive engineer named Duane O’Connor is standing on a picket line outside Penn Station, feeling terrible, holding a sign, asking for what he considers fair wages.
The train has not left the building.
Neither, as yet, has any kind of resolution.
Written on 16th May 2026, the first day of the LIRR strike. The trains, as of publication, are still not running. The politicians are still talking. The commuters are still walking.
Until Next Time
Discover more from Dominus Owen Markham
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