Journalist unions exist to provide comic relief for news consumers, and the strike by the New York Times tech workers’ union should give you a good chuckle.

The union wants you to “honor the digital picket line and not play popular NYT Games such as World and Connections as well as not use the NYT Cooking app.”

There’s hardly a better illustration of how completely nonsensical America’s 1930s labor-relations model is in the modern day than the idea of a “digital picket line.” If you pay for a New York Times subscription that includes those digital products, you should use them as you please. There is nothing anyone can do to stop you, and you already paid for it. All this union can do is write a press release asking you to not click on certain things on your computer or smartphone.

What these unions yearn for is the good old days when an actual picket line at a coal mine or a car factory meant they could use violence to deny you access to products. The web makes that entire concept impossible (good!), but journalist unions cosplay as oppressed manual laborers because (1) they’re dumb, and (2) the basic structure of U.S. labor-relations law has been frozen in amber since 1935. That’s why unions are not very useful to private-sector workers, 94 percent of whom are not union members, a percentage that has increased steadily for decades no matter how much journalists wish it were otherwise.

You are not under any moral obligation to not do the New York Times crossword puzzle on your phone because a handful of far-left activists are demanding “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion” be written into their labor contract, along with “a ban on scented products in break rooms, unlimited break time, and accommodations for pet bereavement, as well as mandatory trigger warnings in company meetings discussing events in the news,” as Semafor has reported on their contract demands.

In fact, if you subscribe, you should make sure to play every word game the Times offers today and use one of their recipes for dinner tonight, because there’s no such thing as a “digital picket line” and this lame attempt at bullying you should be not only ignored but opposed.