Talks are off and none are planned as the transit strike continues into its second week.

“We’re done until the employer calls me,” said Ken Wilson, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 508, on Thursday.

Wilson said he feels the negotiations, which started at 11 a.m. Wednesday morning and collapsed at 7 a.m. Thursday, were rigged from the beginning.

“They knew (rostering) was going to be an issue and I think they did it to see if we’d walk away, and we didn’t,” Wilson said. “It tells me the employer actually knew we weren’t going to get a deal and it wasn’t more than political theatre and smoke and mirrors.”

“He said it was “borderline bad-faith bargaining.”

Rostering, a system of scheduling shifts, was once off the table with wage concessions, but Eddie Robar, director of Metro Transit, said that was before the strike.

“It was a last-ditch effort for us to do that; however now the strike is on, that ridership and revenue loss is inevitable.  Our issue now is to be … even more operationally efficient as we move forward,” he said.

The package Metro Transit is proposing would cost about $2.1 million. But Robar said the union’s demands would cost $8.8 million.

“I would never leave my people on the street over money. This is about quality of life and rostering and they know that,” Wilson said.

Robar said he’s willing to sit down with the union again to figure out how to work in rostering.

“That starts with the ATU recognizing that in order to move forward, we need to be more efficient at what we do,” he said.