SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) — A judge ruled in favor of the VTA over ATU Local 265 on Wednesday, ending its 16-day strike.
The judge agreed with the transit authority that the workers union violated a “no strike clause” in their contract and ordered all employees back to work.
Now for the first time in 17 days, VTA employees returned back to work on Thursday.
Despite that, bus service will not return until Friday morning. Before that can happen, workers are now in the process of inspecting equipment, facilities, buses, light rail, tracks and trains. Light rail service isn’t expected to return until Monday at the earliest.
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A spokesperson for VTA said that during the strike, when lines were unsupervised, there was quite a bit of copper wire theft. Trains can’t run without copper wire on the tracks.
“During the last two weeks when there was no train running on any track anywhere, copper wire theft skyrocketed, particularly on one of our lines,” said Stacey Hendler Ross, a spokesperson for VTA. “So that has to be replaced, that work has to be done. We want to make sure that everything is as safe as it possibly can be before we get service going.”
Raj Singh, president of ATU Local 265, spoke to ABC7 moments after a judge ruled in favor of the transit authority on Wednesday.
“I don’t really understand how the agency could take the position they did and then the judge ended up buying some of those claims,” Singh said. “At the end of the day, the workers lost today, and so we’re disappointed with the outcome.”
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In a statement posted on social media, the union said it plans to appeal the judge’s ruling.
No new date or time has been set to resume contract negotiations.
Because bus and light rail service is still not available, VTA is continuing to offer uber vouchers to impacted passengers from anywhere in the county through the end of the day.
The vouchers do not have to be ordered from a transit stop.
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