> I think the answer to that is a strong union able to bring down the website

Unions cannot cause intentional or malicious destruction of their workplace.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/01/politics/labor-strike-supreme...

That was clearly intended to permanently damage/destroy the equipment.

Coding a time bomb into the website would be illegal, but they can't force you back to work to fix a bug/outage that happens to occur during the strike.

If your highly cacheable, almost entirely static news site goes out when no one is touching anything, that's pretty suspect.

I suspect you underestimate the complexity of the NYT site and keeping it running.

Especially with a huge election tomorrow.

Just saying, if it's built acceptably well, it shouldn't require engineers putting out fires constantly to not go down. But I'm sure you're right that I'm underestimating the complexity of the system as it's been constructed.

And I guess it's not the case that no one is touching anything, it's being updated constantly.

In particular, tomorrow night is going to have a lot of things needing rapid tweaking; some random county in Missouri is gonna somehow have an emoji in their election count CSV because someone hit the wrong key, some new microservice will choke under the once-every-four-years load, etc.

I see how you could think that based on my phrasing, but presumably they have jobs because they do important work.

I didn't meant to imply they would or should sabotage anything.