1,300 Casino Workers Are Proving Wynn Resorts Wrong, One Picket Shift at a Time

Since 7 a.m. on September 4, more than 1,300 housekeepers, cooks, dealers, bartenders, valets and warehouse staff have held the line outside Encore Boston Harbor in Everett, Massachusetts. Three weeks in, the casino is still open, run on managers and temp hires, and Wynn Resorts still hasn't scheduled a new bargaining session. That's not an accident. It's the plan.

The workers, organized in UNITE HERE Local 26 and Teamsters Local 25, are asking for a $10-an-hour raise over three years for non-tipped staff and $5 for tipped staff — enough to bring Encore's pay in line with other unionized Boston hotels. Wynn's counteroffer: less than half that, plus a push to shift health costs onto employees and loosen the job-security guarantees that have existed since the casino opened in 2019. The company's own numbers undercut its case. Local 26 says members' wages have risen roughly 40 percent over four years while the property's revenue grew about 2 percent in the same stretch — and Wynn's SEC filing shows Encore's Q2 2026 revenue actually fell 3 percent year over year. There is no crisis of affordability here. There is a five-star resort that has decided its workforce should absorb costs its balance sheet doesn't require.

What makes this strike a template rather than just a local dispute is the legal trap it's walking through. Because the walkout is over economic terms and not an unfair-labor-practice charge, the strikers are classified as "economic strikers" under the NLRA — meaning Wynn cannot fire them, but can legally staff the casino with permanent replacements and never has to lay off a single scab to get the strikers their jobs back once a deal lands. This is the mechanism that turns a strike into an endurance contest by design: the law protects the boss's right to operate around the workers exercising a right the same law nominally grants them. Every long hospitality strike in this country runs into that same wall, and every one of them either breaks it by holding the picket line long enough to make replacement staffing untenable, or gets ground down by it.

So far the workers are winning the war of attrition on the ground, even if the boardroom hasn't blinked. Boston and Everett city councils have both passed resolutions backing the strikers. UFCW Local 1445 and other locals have shown up on the line. The unions have turned the fight outward, telling the public plainly: don't book the rooms, don't play the tables, don't cross the line to spend money at a place that won't pay its own staff the going Boston rate. That's the only leverage that matters when federal law lets the employer wait you out — public pressure has to make waiting expensive too.

None of this is unique to a casino in Everett. It's the same fight happening across hospitality, logistics, and care work everywhere bosses have decided that four years of double-digit profit swings for shareholders and single-digit scraps for workers is a sustainable business model. The workers on that picket line aren't asking Wynn Resorts for a miracle. They're asking a company that made $209 million in one quarter to pay its slot attendants what a Hampton Inn down the street already pays its housekeepers. Solidarity means not booking the room until they get it.

Sources

PressTemps: Encore Boston Harbor Strike Stretches Into a Sixth Day
MassLive: Why 1,300 Encore Boston Harbor workers are still on strike
Yogonet: Encore Boston Harbor strike enters third week
NewsBreak: Encore Boston Harbor Strike Enters Its 20th Day