No deal, no strike: SEPTA and transit union will continue talks despite contract expiring

Leaders of SEPTA’s largest employee union, Transport Workers Local 234, and the transit agency’s management agreed Thursday to keep negotiating even as the current contract was set to expire early Friday morning, postponing a strike that would have snarled travel in the Philadelphia region, disrupting schools, workplaces, and commerce.

“We have made some headway toward a fair agreement and decided to continue talking,” TWU Local 234 president Brian Pollitt said shortly before 9:30 p.m. as the two sides walked out of a conference room at the Wyndham Philadelphia Historical District in Old City. “There won’t be a strike tonight.”

SEPTA will continue “good-faith negotiations” toward a deal that is “fair to our hardworking employees and to the customers and taxpayers who fund SEPTA,” spokesperson Andrew Busch said, noting that all SEPTA services will continue to operate on normal schedules on Friday.

» READ MORE: What you need to know about a possible SEPTA strike

Pollitt said the negotiators are scheduled to meet Friday to pick up where they left off. The strike option is still on the table as the contract was not formally extended.

“I still have the right to call a strike, but I’m trying to do the honorable thing,” he said. “We don’t want to hurt the people of this region if we can avoid it.”

The union is pushing for a wage increase and security improvements to protect frontline workers from assaults and harassment. For its part, SEPTA has said that its ongoing fiscal crisis limits its flexibility to spend.

SEPTA had insisted on a one-year contract with no wage increases until Thursday, Pollitt said.

Negotiators met for hours on Thursday, racing against the clock to try to get an agreement on a new contract as the 5,000-member union was poised to launch a strike that would have begun shutting down SEPTA transit services in the city at 12:01 a.m. Friday.

“I’ll roll my sleeves up and bang on the table and do everything I have to do to avoid a strike,” Pollitt told reporters shortly after noon.

SEPTA also said it was willing to redouble efforts at the bargaining table. The talks had seemed stalled over wages. The transit agency opened with an offer of a one-year contract with no increase in wages for union members.

SEPTA faces a $240 million deficit that could bring service cuts and a second fare increase soon, with no action in Harrisburg on an increase in state aid for public transportation systems proposed by Gov. Josh Shapiro.

Local 234 represents bus, subway, and trolley operators, mechanics, cashiers, maintenance workers and custodians. Members voted unanimously last week to authorize a strike.

SEPTA’s Broad Street and Market-Frankford Lines and its trolley and bus routes in the city would not operate in the event workers walk off the job.

Regional Rail, the Norristown High Speed Line, suburban buses, the Media/Sharon Hill trolley lines and paratransit would continue to operate.

Asked about SEPTA’s financial struggles, Pollitt said the agency has a $600 million “rainy day fund” and needed to use some of it to invest in its workforce. “We don’t want it all,” he said.

SEPTA says the balance in the cash account, called the Service Stabilization Fund, fluctuates from day to day and month to month as money is moved out to pay for operating and capital costs and revenue comes in from sources like state grants.

Its balance stood at $565 million as of June 30, the close of the fiscal year, and the account currently has $286 million cash in it, after having dipped to $105 million last month before some already committed state grants arrived, SEPTA officials said.

Using working capital for pay increases would worsen the fiscal crisis as the cost would compound in the future, the officials said — unless there was another funding source to back up the long-term commitment.

In an earlier interview with The Inquirer, Pollitt said the agency often “miraculously” finds cash squirreled away to fund its priorities, including $40 million on planning and design for a proposed extension of the Norristown High Speed Line to King of Prussia — a project suspended indefinitely after the Federal Transit Administration declined to help finance it.

“SEPTA has a tendency to try to make people think they’re strapped. That’s not the case,” Pollitt said in the interview.

Meanwhile, authority board members and the staff are considering an across-the-board fare hike of 22.5% early next year, on top of an effective 7.5% increase enacted in October by eliminating some discounts.

That move would amount to SEPTA riders paying about 30% more for each trip on transit.

SEPTA is known as one of the most strike-prone large transit systems in the country. Since 1975, at least 11 unions have walked off the job. Last year, SEPTA police officers struck for three days in December after working without a contract for nine months.

» READ MORE: A history of SEPTA strikes