Two hundred and eleven. That’s how many Teamsters Local 25 members at Encore Boston Harbor work in the warehouse, horticulture, call center, cage, limo and valet operations, dispatch, traffic control and guest experience. They are a fraction of the more than 1,300 workers who walked off the job Friday after contract talks with Wynn Resorts collapsed, and they are also the single best illustration of why a casino strike is not a hospitality story you can skim past.
Here’s the thesis: the Encore Boston Harbor strike matters to players precisely because the jobs on the picket line are the ones nobody notices until they stop. Nobody books a trip for the warehouse crew. But the cage cashier who turns your chips back into cash, the dispatcher who gets the limo to your door, the call centre agent who fixes a botched hotel reservation — that’s the machinery a casino floor sits on top of. Pull it out and the building still opens. It just doesn’t work the same way.
What the two sides are actually arguing about
The contract covering the union workforce expired on August 31, and no replacement has been agreed. Members of UNITE HERE Local 26, the region’s hotel and food-service union, and Teamsters Local 25 voted in August to authorise a strike. According to the Teamsters, Encore management declined to return to the bargaining table with meaningful improvements even after that vote. The unions want higher wages, stronger benefits and better job protections.
Wynn’s position is that it never left the table. “The unions have chosen to initiate a strike despite our continued efforts to reach an agreement through negotiations,” the company said in a statement, adding that it wants a deal that is “fair, financially sustainable, and protects jobs for the long term.” The company also stressed that Encore Boston Harbor “remains open and operational.”
Both sides are arguing with numbers, and the numbers are genuinely in tension. This is the heart of the dispute:
| Figure | Value | Who cites it |
|---|---|---|
| Estimated property revenue last year | $847 million | Unions |
| Average compensation and benefits per union-represented employee | Exceeds $95,000 a year | Encore |
| Growth in union wages and benefits over four years | 36.8% | Encore |
| Revenue growth over the same four years | 1.9% | Encore |
| Voluntary turnover among union staff | 3.9% | Encore |
| Union employees who say they are proud to work there | 86% | Encore |
You can read that table two ways, which is exactly why there’s a strike. The unions see a property clearing well over three quarters of a billion dollars a year and ask why that doesn’t translate into a better deal. Encore sees labour costs rising nearly twenty times faster than revenue and calls that unsustainable. Neither framing is dishonest. They’re measuring different things.
The revenue line that gives Wynn its argument
Encore’s “flat revenue” claim isn’t rhetorical. Wynn reported second-quarter operating revenue from Encore Boston Harbor of $209.3 million, down $6.4 million from $215.7 million a year earlier. For a single property in a mature regional market, that’s a soft quarter, not a crisis — but it’s not a growth story either.
The more interesting detail for anyone who follows the math is the table games win percentage: 18.1% for the quarter, inside the property’s expected band of 18% to 22%, but well below the 21.3% it ran a year before. That figure is hold, not house edge, and the difference trips up a lot of people. House edge is the fixed mathematical advantage baked into each game — 2.7% on a single-zero roulette wheel, for example. Hold is the share of the money players buy in with that the casino ends up keeping after chips get bet, won, re-bet and cashed out. Hold swings with how long players stay at the table, how big they bet and plain luck over a few thousand hands.
So part of that revenue dip is luck, not demand. A property running at the bottom of its hold range instead of near the top can look softer than it is. Operators know this. Unions know it too, which is why “revenue grew 1.9%” lands differently depending on which quarter you start counting from.
Why casinos are such fertile ground for labour fights
Three structural facts make casino resorts unusually strike-prone compared with most employers their size.
- They can’t move. A licensed casino is tied to a specific building and a specific state regulator. There’s no offshoring the cage or the valet stand.
- They run 24/7 and are brutally labour-intensive. Dealers, cashiers, housekeepers, cooks, valets and dispatchers all have to be physically present, in shifts, every hour the doors are open.
- Their finances are public. When a parent company is listed, every union negotiator can read quarterly revenue, hold percentage and margin. Few workforces bargain with that much information about their employer’s actual take.
Add a contract expiry date that lands in the same month across multiple bargaining units, and you get a lot of leverage concentrated into a single week. Thomas Mari, president of Local 25, put the logic bluntly: “When a company refuses to respect the workers who make its profits possible, we shut it down.”
What “open and operational” tends to mean in practice
Take the company at its word: the casino is open. Gaming floors are usually the last thing to close in a walkout, because table games and slots are the revenue engine and because managers and non-union staff get redeployed to keep them running. What historically gives first in a labour dispute at a full-service resort is everything wrapped around the gaming floor.
If you have a trip booked, the practical expectations are these. Expect longer waits where service is hands-on: valet and self-park flow, bell service, room cleaning cadence, restaurant hours and the number of outlets actually open. Expect the phones to be slower, since the call centre is part of the striking group. Expect the cage to be busier, because cage cashiers are too — which matters most if you plan to cash out a large amount or handle anything that needs a supervisor’s signature. Expect a picket line at the entrances, and expect it to be noisy and legal.
None of that stops you playing. It does change the arithmetic of a weekend built around amenities rather than the floor. If the spa, the steakhouse and the limo transfer are why you booked, call the property directly and confirm what’s running before you travel instead of trusting the website. And if you choose not to cross a picket line, that’s a reasonable call too.
What to watch from here
Strikes at destination resorts tend to end one of two ways: a negotiated contract once the cost of disruption exceeds the cost of the raise, or a long grind if both sides believe the other will blink. James Atkins, a lead gardener and chief steward at Local 25, signalled which way his members are leaning: “We’re on the picket line and will stay out as long as it takes to get a fair deal.”
The signals worth tracking are a return to the bargaining table, any movement from UNITE HERE Local 26 separately from the Teamsters, and Wynn’s next quarterly disclosure for Encore Boston Harbor. A strike that runs into a holiday weekend or a strong sports calendar costs a regional casino real money, and that pressure usually shows up in the numbers before it shows up in a press release. Reporting on the walkout was published by CDC Gaming.
One last thing, because it’s easy to lose in a labour story: a disrupted trip is a bad time to chase a loss. The house edge doesn’t care about the picket line, and a short-handed property with long waits is exactly the environment where people play longer than they planned. Set a deposit or spend limit before you go, use the session reminders your operator offers, and treat any gambling budget as entertainment money you’ve already spent.
