The New South Wales government has reached an agreement with the rail unions, ending months of negotiations and industrial action.
The proposed enterprise agreement will see about 13,000 rail workers receive a 12% pay increase over three years, plus back pay.
“This agreement will bring relief to the disruption from protected industrial action that a million daily rail commuters have been forced to endure while just trying to get to work and get around,” the NSW transport minister, John Graham, said in a statement on Friday.
The agreement also includes technology-based solutions to improve recovery times when there are incidents on the tracks, including a new digital disruption management system that will replace the manual phone call system.
The pay deal will see yearly increases of 4% each year, with back pay back to 1 May 2024.
The Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RTBU) NSW said it was working to get the draft agreement to members as soon as possible. Members will then review it and vote on it – and if the agreement is supported, it will go to Fair Work Commission for final approval.
RTBU NSW secretary, Toby Warnes, said that discussions with the state government over the past few weeks had been fruitful.
“This is a very positive development that will no doubt come as welcome relief to commuters as well as rail workers,” Warnes said.
“We’ve reached a point where we have an agreement that includes crucial safety features as well as fair and reasonable wages and other conditions.”
There will be a mechanism for the union to escalate any safety concerns related to a new project.
Warnes said rail workers had been on the receiving end of “some atrocious abuse” throughout the process, amid industrial action.
“We’re now looking forward to seeing the NSW government turn its focus to improving our transport system across the state,” he said.
“We’d like to thank the new transport minister for the role he’s clearly played in helping us finally reach this point.”
‘Strained the patience of train passengers’
The NSW government said on Friday that the combined rail unions had agreed to support the rollout and other changes to reduce time lost to delays.
“This process has strained the patience of train passengers but in finalising this deal we have made a very important investment in reliability,” Graham said.
“This much-needed reset allows us to implement improvements for passengers with the full support of the rail workforce and unions,” he said.
The agreement, if supported by employees, will bring to an end about a year of negotiations and work stoppages since the last agreement lapsed in May 2024.
The NSW government said one outstanding clause remains that the Electrical Trades Union [ETU] does not support, and the Fair Work Commission is working to resolve, but said it does not affect the agreement with the combined rail unions.
The unions had sought a 32% pay rise over four years, compared with the government’s starting offer of 9.5% over three years. The 12% offer was first made in February.
According to Transport for NSW, an average Sydney Trains driver earns about $128,000 a year– factoring in common overtime and allowances – while a guard on the network earns about $115,000.
The RTBU counters that the average base salary for a Sydney Trains driver is just over $78,000. The latest data from the ABS, released in August 2024, puts median earnings at $72,592 a year.
The NSW opposition leader Mark Speakman seized on the ETU’s disagreement over the clause, suggesting the union was “blocking the agreement”.
“Until we see the actual deal, this is just a press release. Commuters want reliability, not fanfare. A press release isn’t a solution,” Speakman said.
However, Guardian Australia understands that despite the ETU’s lack of support for one clause, the combined rail unions – of which the ETU is a small section – expect this to be resolved and for the broader rail employee workforce to vote in favour of the agreement.
