Nine days in, the picket line at Encore Boston Harbor has settled into a routine. Red shirts on Broadway from early morning. A drum. State reps stopping by for a photo and a chant. And inside, a casino that says it is open and running, staffed by managers and people who do not belong to a union.
What has not happened is a negotiation. As of Monday there were no bargaining sessions on the calendar, and nothing found since suggests that changed this week. The two sides are talking to the public instead of to each other, and both are talking about the same $3.
How it got here
About 1,350 workers walked out at 7 a.m. on Friday, September 4. Housekeepers, cooks, servers, bartenders, slot attendants, warehouse workers, drivers. Most belong to UNITE HERE Local 26. The Teamsters Local 25 unit is 211 people: warehouse, horticulture, call center, cage cashiers, limo drivers, dispatchers, valet and guest experience. Their contract ran out August 31. Talks had started in April. On August 20 the Local 26 membership voted 1,006 to 53 to authorize a strike, and the Teamsters reported 97 percent in their own unit. There was a one-night “test strike” on September 1. Then the real thing.
On day one roughly 300 people blocked the Broadway entrance. Everett police ended up directing traffic. Everett’s new mayor, Robert Van Campen, came down and said what a mayor of Everett more or less has to say: “Encore is an important part of Everett. But so are the people who show up every day and make it successful.”
What the workers want
The number is $10 an hour over three years for non-tipped workers and $5 for tipped, which is the same shape as the deal Local 26 won from the downtown Boston hotels in December 2024. Current wages run from about $15 to $32. The unions also want to keep the health plan and the contract language that guarantees a minimum number of hours, which they say Wynn wants to strip out.
Laura Moye, an executive vice president at Local 26, put the gap plainly to NBC Boston: “The difference right now is about three bucks an hour and what we don’t understand is how can workers at a five-star casino be making less than workers at the Hampton Inn.” A groundskeeper and shop steward named Icylyn Whittaker said it shorter on the line: “What we are asking for is the Boston standard.”
The union’s website adds an argument aimed at the Gaming Commission rather than at Wynn. When Wynn applied for its license it projected 3,287 full-time jobs, about $11,500 a year in benefits per worker and 86 percent retention by year five. Local 26 says the real numbers are 2,367 jobs, about $4,900 in benefits and 45 percent retention by year four. Those are the union’s figures. I have not checked them against the Commission’s filings, and neither, as far as I can find, has anyone else this week.
What Wynn says
Wynn’s position has not moved since the strike vote. It wants a deal “grounded in financial reality” that is “fair, financially sustainable and protects jobs for the long term.” Its one hard number: over four years, union wages and benefits at Encore grew 36.8 percent while revenue grew 1.9 percent. It says the average union worker there makes $95,718 in pay and benefits against $80,639 for comparable Greater Boston jobs. The union’s answer is that the $95,718 counts tips, which customers pay, not Wynn, and that Wynn pays tipped workers a lower base rate for exactly that reason.
The union’s counter is that Wynn is not short of money. Encore threw off $236.7 million in operating profit in 2025 and put $26.9 million back into the building. Wynn has about $4.6 billion in cash and credit available. Both of those are Wynn’s own reported figures, cited by the union.
Revenue at Encore has slipped about 1 percent a year for two years, to roughly $847 million last year. The casino is enormously profitable and slowly shrinking, and each side picks the half of that sentence it prefers.
Who has shown up
Van Campen on day one. State Representative Jeff Turco of Winthrop walked the line with his children on Sunday and said Encore “need[s] to get to the table and compensate their workers.” Boston 25 reported Boston Mayor Michelle Wu on the picket line, though I found no second outlet confirming it. Local 26 posted thanks Friday to Representatives Kate Lipper-Garabedian and Steve Ultrino for joining, and said the Somerville City Council passed a resolution urging people to stay away from the casino until the strike is settled. I could not find the resolution itself.
Nothing from the Healey administration. Nothing from the Gaming Commission. No mediator has been named by anyone.
Why Chelsea should care
Local 26 says the people on that picket line live in Everett, Chelsea, Malden, Revere, Lynn and Boston. When Chelsea went to arbitration against Wynn in 2014 and lost, the one thing the city did get was a promise to prefer local hires, and the last public count, from 2019 to 2021, put 93 Chelsea residents among Encore’s new hires. Some of them are standing on Broadway this week.
The other Chelsea stake is money. The state’s Community Mitigation Fund, which sent Chelsea just over $1 million this fiscal year, is paid from casino tax revenue. A casino running on skeleton staff for weeks takes in less, and pays the state less, and the Legislature has already swept most of that fund into the general budget for the next two years. That is a slow leak, not a flood, but it runs in Chelsea’s direction.
Encore, for its part, still has two hotels and a commuter rail stop to build across the street under the deal it struck with the old mayor hours before the new one took the oath. Van Campen has said he hopes his predecessor “did make that happen” for Everett’s benefit. He now has a picket line on the same block to remind him who else is watching.
We ran the longer history of Chelsea’s arbitration loss and what the city actually receives from Encore last week. The short version has not changed: $650,000 a year, a cancelled shuttle, and a 50-minute walk.