Can you provide a source on the 15% number? Is that 15% of all employed people or just in a specific sector. If it is a specific sector how is that defined?

I read it in one of the flurry of newspaper articles in the last couple days about Amazon, but don't recall which.

Doing some googling:

Amazon Aug 2017 had 40,000 workers in Seattle:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/thanks-to-amazo...

Workers in Seattle are currently 425,827

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/seattle-wa/

So the 15% figure is plausible.

This person is wrong unless you define the worker market in some weird way that excludes other large employers like Boeing and uw. This article from 2018 lists other large employers, and Amazon looks smaller than expected https://www.tripsavvy.com/biggest-seattle-area-employers-296...

I think the difference is "Seattle" vs "Seattle area."

Google says that Seattle has a population of ~725k. Let's say that half of them are working. 725k * 50% * 15% ~= 54k.

54k Amazon employees in the city limits sounds at least in the ballpark.

The "Seattle area" includes Bellevue, Tacoma, etc., which about triples the number of people.