SAN JOSE >> One week after returning to work at the orders of a Santa Clara County judge, the union representing Valley Transportation Authority workers is worried it has lost its leverage as contract negotiations with the agency have remained stalled.

Amalgamated Transit Union Local 265 walked off the job March 10 after negotiations for a new contract fell apart the week before. The historic strike lasted for 21/2 weeks — leaving residents across the county scrambling to find walking, bike and ride-sharing routes to their destinations — before a county judge ordered them to return to work last week.

“Us being forced back to work, we’ve lost any leverage that we had, and the agency has no real motivation to schedule any meetings,” said ATU Local 265 President Raj Singh. “The last resort is the strike, and for a judge or anybody to strip (workers) of that right is not fair.”

He added that the union workers feel like they are being told “your voice is really irrelevant.”

“The majority of the folks are just angry and frustrated,” Singh said. “Some folks are scared and kind of nervous at work, not knowing how the public is going to treat them, not knowing the retaliation that they might face at work.”

Union workers returned to the job last week after Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Daniel T. Nishigaya issued an injunction halting the strike. The VTA had filed the lawsuit on the first day of the strike alleging that the union violated a “no strike” clause in its contract, while the union maintained that the clause no longer applied because the contract expired.

ATU Local 265 filed an appeal Wednesday asking a higher court to reconsider the ruling.

The union was largely motivated to file the appeal to preserve the integrity of the contract language, Singh said. Leaders of the workers group continue to believe that the judge does not have the jurisdiction to issue an injunction and stop a transit strike.

If granted, a stay on the injunction would not mean the union would immediately go back on strike, Singh said, but rather it would ensure that the union still has that option if needed in “efforts to revitalize negotiations.” But Singh noted that if a 17-day strike did not notably move negotiations, he is not sure what a longer strike would achieve.

“The strike was the only thing that was keeping negotiations moving,” Singh said. “We had already been in negotiations for seven months, and the strike was our last resort.”

Singh added that now the VTA does not have “any reasons” to schedule negotiation meetings. He said that the VTA has not responded to two emails requesting meetings and that the agency sent emails with the previous contract offers over the weekend.

“I believe at this point they feel like they have the upper hand,” Singh said. “Those offers were rejected by our membership, and we’re not going to just take a vote again on the same offers.”

Stacey Hendler Ross, the public information officer for VTA, said that the VTA has made “multiple modifications” to its contract offers but ATU “has made none.”

“That’s really not negotiating in good faith on their part,” Hendler Ross said. “They need to come up with something that will help resolve the conflict, and sticking to their proposal without any changes or modifications at all is not a way to resolve a conflict.”

Robert Ovetz, a lecturer in political science at San Jose State University, said that the injunction issued last week violates the modern premise of labor relations, which relies on both the employer and the worker agreeing to a contract.

“The injunction tips the balance of power in favor of the employer — in this case, VTA — because it requires that the workers forcibly return to work — which they have — under the terms of the previous contract, which they did not approve,” Ovetz said. “It actually does create a really bad precedent that really turns the clock back nearly a century to when employers sought court injunctions to break strikes and to break unions.”

Ovetz added that there was “no indication” that the judge had the authority to impose an injunction halting the strike.

When negotiations initially ended, the union was seeking a raise of 18% over three years, and the agency was offering a raise of 9% over three years. The agency currently has two contract offers the union can accept — one that offers a 10.5% raise over three years, and one that offers an 11% raise over three years, according to the agency’s April 3 bargaining brief.

The contract with the higher raise includes a concession that sick time would not count as hours worked in calculating overtime.

The proposed contract with an 11% raise was resoundingly rejected by ATU members last week.

Under the ATU’s most recent pay scale, bus operators make $43.27 per hour. Under both of the VTA’s most recent offers, that salary would rise in the first year to $45 an hour, according to the VTA’s negotiation briefs.

Comparatively, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority bus operators make $46.15 per hour at the top of the pay scale. SamTrans operators in San Mateo County make $41.71 per hour at the top of the scale, and operators for ACTransit in the East Bay make $38.07 per hour at the top of the scale.

In negotiations, the union floated lower pay raise options than its initial last offer, Singh said, ranging from 14% to 16% raises.

“The answer has always been ‘no,’ ” he said. “The last conversation when we met face to face was, ‘Why don’t you give us what you believe that is fair and what you can afford, and we’ll take it to the members,’ and that would be 11%, and that was rejected.”

The union and agency have not met further in person since that vote, Singh said.

“There was no momentum because that’s how they’ve always treated us,” Singh said. “That’s essentially why the majority of the membership voted to go on strike, is because everybody was tired of the disrespect, the lack of urgency from the agency side.”