I'm not arguing they need to pick the slowest week, but striking a balance seems pretty reasonable and pretty standard for most other unions.
Teachers and health care workers try to be more careful because a bunch of vulnerable people (children, patients) with little to no say in anything about how their respective institutions run are heavily dependent on them. A single newspaper, even the NYT, isn't comparable.
If they had striked last week or the week before they'd have been accused of election interference. Striking this week hurts the Times because they run the risk of losing traffic from people trying to see results, but it doesn't impact the results at all. It's the best possible time to strike this year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
I wonder how people who seem to care so much about politics don't spend any time reading about politics beyond rage bait headlines.
The NYT burning to the ground doesn't seem like a bad outcome if it will force people to use wikipedia which still has hyperlinks.
NYT not publishing sensationalist bullshit? While it's just one outlet out of countless many, the world will be that much more peaceful for but a short while.
It's only via third hand effects that the other party is actually affected, because the parents have to make the admin's life hard.
So teachers consider that their first duty is to the students. Also they are there to help the students to begin with.
You can't count on public sentiment for anything labor oriented in the US - corporations have owned the narrative for the last 40 years. The reason teachers unions avoid clashing is partially because they care about not effecting the kids as much as possible, and partially because they are already keeling over with states dropping the public school system.
Writing such content would be terrible, sounds like a great time to strike.
But it is probably a huge click-driver for NYT.
This actually is probably the best possible moment for a strike, in terms of inconveniencing NYT without harming coverage of important events.
What the public thinks is not particularly relevant, just like it's not relevant to my relationship with my manager.
The only time public sentiment is relevant from a strike is when the public's representatives can order you back to work. That's a risk for a teacher, or a railworker, but not for a newspaper tech.
You get that $70k in the big city school where those dollars do not go very far, while out in the boonies where a shitload of teaching is done, you make far, far, far less.
LCOL = low cost of living for anyone else who may need to look it up.
You would have this problem in any area where there is a lot money sloshing around, e.g. most cities in Switzerland. Unless you have some sort of rent control/social housing, or a lot of surplus market to satisfy a wide variety of demand, those people with money are going to simply outbid you.
They do not get 100 days of PTO. They get an hour per work week of PTO and a mandatory 2 month leave. You can't do anything with that leave because there is no simultaneous need for more workers for those two months in any other industry, so you are basically furloughed.
Keep in mind, the states that aren't killing education generally require serious credentials, like a 4 year degree, to make on average $70k a year.
This also completely ignores the mountains of unpaid work teachers do. Every single hour of homework they have to give out to ensure kids get the practice they need to internalize a lesson is at least an hour of grading work, and that's for the easy stuff like fill in the bubble tests that you can literally automate.
My mother regularly spent until 7pm working her teaching job, because that is what is required to be a good teacher.