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It’s been a prickly week between management and labor along the Charles and Mystic rivers. There are worker disputes in various stages of development in Everett, Boston and Cambridge.

Let’s get organized and walk you through the disputes:

Everett: While the state may be building bridges between Everett and Somerville, casino workers and managers at Encore Boston Harbor can’t seem to do the same. A strike at the Everett casino has stretched into its fifth week. About 1,300 casino workers have been off the job since Sept. 4 (the Friday before Labor Day, how’s that for symbolism?), and it doesn’t look like there’s any resolution in sight.

• Ante up: Carlos Aramayo, president of the workers’ union, Unite Here Local 26, pointed to recent contracts signed by other hospitality workers and management in the area. “ We’re looking for the Encore Boston Harbor to meet the wage and benefit standard that, you know, 40-plus hotels and hospitality employers in the Greater Boston area already agreed to in 2024 and the beginning of 2025.”
• House edge: Casino owner Wynn Resorts says it wants to make a deal, but worker compensation increases have already outpaced the casino’s revenue growth over the years.
• Split: Everett City Council last month unanimously passed a resolution in support of the workers. Casino patrons, meanwhile, are torn, with some telling The Boston Globe their solidarity with the workers won’t stop them from walking into the building to pull on those slot handles.

Boston: Meanwhile, nurses and management at Brigham and Women’s Hospital will meet again today to try and avert a second, longer work stoppage at the world-class medical facility. The nurses, some 4,000-strong, voted to authorize an open-ended strike last month. It’d be their second work stoppage this year: The nurses went out on a one-day strike in July. (But that turned into a five-day work stoppage because Brigham said they had to hire traveling nurses to care for patients, and that contract ran longer than the strike.) The sides met a couple more times before declaring an impasse, according to a September statement from a Mass General Brigham spokesperson.

• What’s on the line: The nurses are demanding better pay bumps than the hospital system has offered, along with better health insurance and limits on the use of temporary nurses. Brigham officials say the nurses are already among the best-paid in the area, and that it can’t afford the additional increases.
• Props from part of the Legislature: The nurses also received a pre-negotiation boost from the majority of the Massachusetts congressional delegation. In a letter posted Wednesday evening, they called nurses “the backbone of our healthcare system” and urged Mass General Brigham to stay at the table to resolve the dispute.
• If you’re a patient: Hospital administrators said they’ll continue to provide top-level care if the nurses do go back out on strike.

Cambridge: Another 4,000 workers, this time at Harvard University, are also thinking about going back out on the line. The Harvard Graduate Students Union is moving closer to its second strike this year, voting Tuesday to authorize the move. The union, which went on a 40-day strike this spring, has been working without a contract for nearly a year and a half.

Phishing for fines: Enough about the picket, let’s talk about parking. More specifically, a parking scam making its way to your smart phone. Boston police say scammers are calling and texting residents, demanding they visit a (phony) website to pay off a parking or traffic ticket. These fakes can even include a QR code or other such tool to make it easy to fleece an unsuspecting mark.

• This isn’t the only recent way scammers are trying to reach into your pocket. Some would-be thieves have sent out spam messages asking folks to pay a couple hundred bucks to appear on a WBUR or NPR show. As Robin Young tells you in this video, that’s not how this works: WBUR and NPR never take money from guests to take part in our programs. If someone tells you to cough up the cash, that person is a scammer and you should notify us at ScamAlerts@wbur.org.

P.S. — Check your mailbox! Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth Bill Galvin says voters who requested a mail-in ballot should see them come through this week. More than 600,000 ballots were sent to voters by his office, and another 300,000 may be sent by local election officials in the coming days. You can check your ballot status by visiting VoteinMA.com.