Pay is a but a single way in which an employer can attempt to unfairly exploit you.

The rest tends to hide behind culture and opportunity. Unpaid overtime framed as dedication, scope creep framed as growth, on-call expectations framed as ownership, understaffing framed as efficiency. You might find these game developers being abused by a few or all of these examples.

Exploitive companies can borrow against your pride, your fear of falling behind, and your desire to be seen as competent until your baseline becomes always available.

That’s a fair opinion but obviously it’s the opinion of the employees and their ability to freely associate that let’s them collectively organise.

Employers having to pay more than they'd prefer to pay for a given type of work/provide better working conditions does not imply "unfair exploitation" of the company by the union, either.

It's just a market reaching equilibrium. It's always weird how employees are forever to be expected to be at the mercy of market forces much greater than they are, while employers have to be shielded from them.