On the first morning of the Encore Boston Harbor strike, the Boston Globe reported that roughly 300 people at the casino’s Broadway entrance were preventing cars from moving in and out. That sentence describes conduct sitting close to a legal line, and where exactly the line falls surprises most people on both sides of it.
The short version: picketing is protected, blocking is not, and in Massachusetts an employer who wants a court to stop the blocking faces a statute written specifically to make that difficult.
What the picket line is allowed to do
Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act protects the right of employees to engage in concerted activity for collective bargaining or mutual aid and protection. A strike is the clearest example. So is picketing, carrying signs, chanting, handing out leaflets, and asking people not to cross.
Persuasion is the protected core. A picket line may try to convince every driver, every guest, and every delivery to turn around. It may be loud about it. It may do so on a public sidewalk, in significant numbers, for as long as the dispute lasts.
What it is not allowed to do
Picketers may patrol and carry signs. They may not physically block people or vehicles from entering or leaving the employer’s property.
That distinction, persuasion versus obstruction, is the entire framework. Mass picketing that blocks ingress and egress to a worksite is a recognized category for injunctive relief under Section 10(j) of the NLRA, which is the provision the National Labor Relations Board uses to go into federal court for an order while an unfair labor practice case is still pending.
Section 7 also runs in both directions. It protects the right of employees to engage in concerted activity, and it protects the right of employees to refrain from it. A non-striking worker who wants to cross and keep working has a statutory right to do so, and interference with that right is itself the basis for a charge.
Why a Massachusetts injunction is harder than it sounds
Here is where the analysis stops tracking the intuition that blocking a driveway produces a fast court order.
Massachusetts has its own anti-injunction statute for labor disputes, G.L. c. 214, section 6, and it imposes real conditions. No restraining order and no preliminary or permanent injunction may issue in a case involving or growing out of a labor dispute except on the basis of findings of fact made and filed by the court in the record before the order issues. The order must be limited to the specific acts expressly complained of in the complaint and expressly included in those findings. A general order telling a union to behave is not available.
The statute also directs the court to consider something employers often do not expect: whether the plaintiff has complied with any legal obligation involved in the dispute, and whether the plaintiff has made every reasonable effort to settle it by negotiation or through available mediation or voluntary arbitration.
An employer asking a Massachusetts judge to enjoin a picket line is therefore inviting scrutiny of its own bargaining conduct. That is by design.
Permanent injunctions under the section expire after one year, and can be renewed only after a new hearing and new findings.
What the Massachusetts courts have done with it
The reported decisions here are Superior Court decisions in the Massachusetts Law Reporter, which means they are persuasive rather than binding, and they are useful mainly as illustrations of how the statute is applied.
In Eastern Middlesex Press Publications, Inc. v. Boston Typographical Union No. 13, 4 Mass. L. Rptr. 44 (Mass. Super. Ct. 1995), the employer alleged that the defendants interfered with ingress and egress at the plant and thereby interfered with non-striking employees’ right to refrain. The court denied the preliminary injunction. Verizon New England, Inc. v. System Council T-6, 29 Mass. L. Rptr. 56 (Mass. Super. Ct. 2011), later engaged with that decision.
An allegation of blocked access, standing alone, did not carry the day. The statute requires findings, and findings require proof of specific acts.
How this applies at Encore, and how it does not
Nothing here is a conclusion about the conduct on Broadway. What has been reported is a single day, described in a single sentence, without detail about duration, whether any vehicle was stopped for more than a moment, whether police were present, or whether anyone was turned away rather than delayed.
Those details are the case. A line of people that slows a car while a driver is handed a leaflet is not the same as a line that refuses to open. The first is ordinary picketing. The second is the conduct the injunction categories exist for.
As of this writing, no party has publicly sought an injunction, and no unfair labor practice charge arising from the picket line has been reported. Wynn Resorts has kept the property open rather than going to court, which is itself a choice with tactical logic behind it.
Two things to watch. Whether Encore files anything in Superior Court, which would put its own bargaining conduct in front of a judge under section 6. And whether the Board becomes involved, which moves the fight to federal court under a different and more employer-friendly standard than the state statute provides.
Also see: getting to Encore during the strike, and the transit route that avoids Broadway.