When you work for an organization for free, don't expect to be taken seriously -- especially when your work is critical to the organization. The fact that they aren't paying you to do critical work shows that the organization has their priorities completely messed up. If they can't afford to pay a team of moderators, then Stack Exchange Inc. is a doomed company. This will not be the last strike. This will not be the last time that Stack Exchange Inc. messes up in a bigg and pointless way.

Just FYI, you can download a dump here of each Stack Exchange forum: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange.