Business Monday — The Daily Boston Brief, September 7, 2026

Labor

The unions want a $10-an-hour raise phased over three years for non-tipped workers and $5 for tipped ones. That is the number at the center of the strike that began at Encore Boston Harbor on Friday morning, and it is the first thing to understand about it: hourly wages in the bargaining unit currently run from $15 to $32, according to the union, and the increase is pitched as the amount that would put a five-star casino level with the union hotels downtown. “If we’re a five-star worker, we should at least get what a Hampton Inn employee gets,” Seth Ogilvie, communications director for UNITE HERE Local 26, told GBH News. More than 1,300 workers — housekeepers, cooks, slot attendants, drivers, grounds crew — are covered by the contract that expired Aug. 31; about 100 walked off Friday morning, and more than 100 were still on the line Saturday. Money is not the whole of it. Both unions are also fighting to keep job-security language and healthcare from the last contract, including a clause guaranteeing a set number of staff a minimum number of hours, which workers say Encore wants to drop and which Encore, asked by GBH, denies trying to drop. Wynn Resorts says it is committed to a deal that is “fair, financially sustainable and protects jobs for the long term,” and offers its own arithmetic: an average compensation-and-benefits package above $95,000 a year for union-represented employees, and union wages and benefits up 36.8 percent over four years against revenue growth of 1.9 percent. Everett’s mayor, Robert J. Van Campen, walked the picket line Saturday. The casino has stayed open throughout. Read more →

Development

HYM Investment Group is the Boston firm known for the biggest and slowest things in the city — Bulfinch Crossing downtown, the Suffolk Downs redevelopment in East Boston and Revere. In the current financing climate its growth is coming from somewhere else entirely: 55-and-over rental communities in the suburbs, built on land nobody else is competing for. Chief investment officer Doug Manz, who has been at the firm since 2009, told Banker & Tradesman his job is finding underused strip malls and college- and church-owned parcels in towns whose demographics fit — the average resident age in these buildings is around 79 or 80. Arlington cleared a rezoning in May for 145 units at the former St. Camillus church site. There is a 20-acre parcel in Weston under contract from Regis College, and 184 units planned at the old Benny’s plaza in Plymouth. The model is deliberately small next to the old continuing-care campuses, 150 to 200 units against 2,000, and it is rental rather than a large buy-in, with independent living, assisted living and memory care in one building and roughly two-thirds of it independent. The partner is NexCore of Denver, whose Experience Senior Living arm operates the buildings. What makes the cost different from ordinary apartments, Manz said, is not the apartments: it is the commercial kitchen, three restaurant-style dining rooms, a secured memory-care floor, pools and fitness and craft rooms, and running the shuttle vans. Read more →

Small business

Brookline Lunch has been doing breakfast plates and Mediterranean cooking on Brookline Street in Cambridge for 37 years, and it has never had a second location. That changes at 108 L Street in South Boston, the room the L Street Diner ran out of, which the owners say they have quietly been working on for four months. Boston Restaurant Talk reported the expansion Friday, and the business’s own announcement says it is “racing toward opening” and hopes to serve its first plates within about a week, with new signage still to come. Two things make this worth a paragraph on Labor Day. One is the arithmetic of the neighborhood: a 37-year-old independent taking over a shuttered diner is the opposite of the direction most of these stories run. The other is what the owners said themselves, which was less a growth announcement than a hedge — that no second room will ever make the magic the original did. Read more →

Boston Labor Day Parade · Free · Today 10am · Copley Square

The Greater Boston Labor Council’s parade steps off from Copley under a cloudless 78 degrees. Given what is happening in Everett this weekend, the marching is likely to have more in it than usual.

Elevation Rhythm: Washed Tour · Tuesday 6pm · House of Blues, Lansdowne Street

The North Carolina pop-worship band on Lansdowne Street on a night the Sox are also home, so give yourself extra time in the Fenway crowd.

Francis Fukuyama: In the Realm of the Last Man · Free · Wednesday 6pm · Cambridge Public Library

The end-of-history man on his new book, in the Broadway main library, free and hosted by Harvard Book Store. The room fills for these.

Pete Yorn: Solo Acoustic · Thursday 7pm · The Sinclair, Harvard Square

Just him and a guitar in a room that holds a few hundred, which is the right way to hear those records twenty-odd years on.

Cambridge

Thomas Rose, 37, an archaeometallurgy specialist who joined MIT in January, was struck by a vehicle while cycling through the Massachusetts Avenue and Memorial Drive intersection at about 6 a.m. on Aug. 21. He died at Massachusetts General Hospital on Sept. 2, and the crash itself had not been publicly reported in the twelve days between. State Police and the Middlesex District Attorney’s office are investigating; at a vigil, state Rep. Mike Connolly said a truck had been involved and that the driver would appear to be at fault, though no charges have been described. The intersection was already flagged: MassDOT counts it among the state’s top 200 crash clusters and in the top 5 percent for bicycle crashes, with 61 reported between 2012 and 2021, and Cambridge Bike Safety volunteers had hung banners there in July. Per Cambridge Day. Read more →

Public safety

A small plane went down around 9 p.m. Saturday in a wooded area off Center Street in Ludlow, near the Belchertown line. The Hampden District Attorney’s office confirmed two people died at the scene. State police detectives and Ludlow police are investigating with the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, both of which were notified and responded. Neither the aircraft nor the victims had been identified as of Sunday morning. Per NBC10 Boston. Read more →

Development

Old North Development, which is planning a 61,300-square-foot building with 71 apartments at 1740 Massachusetts Avenue on the site now holding Walgreens, Simon’s Coffee Shop and Keezer’s Classic Clothing, has sued the city over its Inclusionary Housing Ordinance. Cambridge adopted the ordinance in 1998 and amended it in 2017; it requires any development of ten or more units to make 20 percent of residential floor area permanently affordable, which here means 14 of the 71 apartments. The developer’s argument is narrow and, if it lands, consequential: because the building already complies as of right, the company says it receives “no additional development rights or other benefit from the City” in exchange, making the set-aside an uncompensated taking. The filing also puts numbers on the delay, at $23,600 a week. Per Cambridge Day. Read more →

Synergy has refinanced 101 Arch St. for $92.1 million after a $20 million repositioning, with JLL sourcing the loan from Rialto Capital Management. The Boston firm bought the 21-story, 411,195-square-foot tower in March 2024 for $78 million and has since signed more than 220,000 square feet of new leases and renewals, among them Folia Health, Shift Technology, HED Architects and Jobber Software, plus a renewal from the Downtown Boston Alliance. JLL’s Tom Sullivan calls it one of the first multi-tenant office towers in Boston to refinance successfully since the pandemic — a lender’s vote on downtown, and the kind of number worth watching for whether others follow. Per Banker & Tradesman. Read more →