Idled by the Trump administration’s freezing of Gateway funding, almost 1,000 workers won’t suffer alone as they go without pay, their union leader said Monday. The workers’ communities have a burden, too.
“They won’t get a paycheck,” Brent Booker, general president of Laborers’ International Union of North America, or LIUNA, told NJ Spotlight News. “So they can’t contribute to their community, they can’t contribute to the local economy.”
A federal judge on Feb. 6 ordered a halt to President Donald Trump’s plan to defund the $16 billion passenger rail tunnel rehabilitation and construction, the nation’s biggest infrastructure project and, supporters say, the most urgently needed. On Monday, though, work was mostly at a halt, and construction crews rallied at the North Bergen tunnel entrance site alongside union officials, Gov. Mikie Sherrill and U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
“We shouldn’t have to be in court,” Booker said. “We shouldn’t have to be filing temporary restraining orders to pay New Jersey residents to go build infrastructure that’s going to benefit the entire East Coast of the United States.”
The ruling last week to unfreeze funding, by Judge Jeanette Vargas of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, signaled hope for the project, whose costs were approved by Congress. That order, though, is held up as Trump appeals. The workers were laid off after the Gateway Development Commission said it had no options to pay its bills.
The Trump administration reportedly told Schumer that he would consider providing the funding if Washington Dulles International Airport and Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan were renamed in the president’s honor, according to The New York Times.
“While he’s worried about the name of a train station or an airport,” Booker said, “we have hundreds of our members who are worried about when they’ll get their next paycheck and how they’re going to put food on their table and pay their rents and mortgages.”
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