The software engineers have plenty of leverage over every company without unions. A proof of that is high wages across the industry. And for Amazon in particular, where is that extra money coming from? It's not like they have a dividend to shareholders they could stop paying out. They're not some law firm where the partners are profit sharing. It's a publicly traded company that just constantly reinvests in growth. They're practically famous for that. So really to pay more, they must either get more efficient (probably already trying at that) or raise prices or stop reinvesting. I guess they could pay the higher paid workers less, but isn't that already the software engineers we're talking about? Those are the higher paid workers.

As an aside, I sometimes wonder if they could literally have qualified as a not for profit whose sole goal is to grow into new market segments and employ more people. Because if you take a wide angle view of it, that's pretty much all they ever do.

> A proof of that is high wages across the industry.

That's true if you only consider a few carefully-chosen tech corridors like SV and sorta-Seattle. Software developer wages in much of the US, Europe, and most of the rest of the world, are not that great. Usually enough to live off of, yes, but no where near what we in the bay area and a few other select locations are used to.

High wages relative to other wages, sure. High wages relative to the profit generated? Not so much.

High wages without a union only come out of an even larger pool of profit for them to pay wages from.