Davion Johnson long realized that they and their colleagues deserved higher pay, fairer treatment, and greater respect at the Corning plant in Hemlock, Michigan.

But nothing drove home the need for change more than a supervisor’s callous response when a coworker fell from a ladder.

Instead of calling an ambulance, Johnson recalled, the supervisor threatened to dock the injured man a sick day if he left to seek care on his own.

An angry Johnson subsequently helped to lead 1,400 coworkers in a successful union drive with the United Steelworkers (USW). Now, they wield a collective voice on safety, pay, and other issues as they do the important work of manufacturing components for the nation’s solar industry.

Rampant inequality continues to fuel record support for unions nationwide. In all, 71 percent of Americans now approve of unions, and a growing number want organized labor to have more influence in American life, a new Gallup poll found.

Johnson’s experience shows why.

With costs of groceries, healthcare, utilities, and mortgages all skyrocketing, everyday families are falling further behind in today’s economy than they did during the pandemic.

Banding together empowers workers to fight for the higher wages they need to survive an affordability crisis that’s battering everyone except the uberwealthy. Studies show that union workers make higher wages, on average, than nonunion peers while also narrowing wage- and gender-based pay gaps.

But as Johnson came to understand, inequality isn’t solely measured in money. It isn’t only working people struggling to make ends meet while the rich get richer at our expense.

It’s just as pernicious in how bosses view workers with disdain, deny them a seat at the table, and even put their lives at risk, treating them as expendable machine parts rather than the skilled people responsible for a company’s prosperity.

Consider these examples:

• The Occupational Safety and Health Administration repeatedly cited an Ohio contractor for failing to protect its nonunion workers from falls before a teenager on a company construction site in Pittsburgh plunged three stories, sustaining a serious head injury, in September.
• Four times, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health put Amazon—founded by Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest people—on its annual list of unsafe employers because of deaths, injuries and intimidation of nonunion workers at company warehouses.
•  Residents of Ascension Parish, Louisiana, grew so alarmed about reports of child and prison labor in Hyundai’s supply chain that they’re pushing for unionization of workers at a steel mill the company is building there.

Corning’s mistreatment of the worker who fell off the ladder fits right into the pattern.

As workers there battled safety issues, however, they also faced arbitrary scheduling changes, favoritism, and other indignities. Attempts to discuss these problems with management got the workers nowhere.

Amid mounting frustration, Johnson sometimes thought about the previous generations of workers who powered the nation’s manufacturing economy. No one pushed them around. They raised middle-class families, owned their own homes, bought cars, took vacations, and retired in dignity.

“What are we missing?” Johnson asked, comparing workers at Corning with those who came before them.

The answer, Johnson realized, was a union.

Corning attempted to thwart the workers’ union drive, as corporations often do when workers decide to exercise collective power. Johnson expressed surprise at “how hard they pushed back with their anti-union messaging and how much effort they put into making sure those messages were heard.”

“They put TVs in all the breakrooms and a projector up on the wall of my department within probably three days of us filing for a union election,” they said, noting the anti-union propaganda played on a loop.

But the efforts backfired.

The harder Corning fought against the union drive, the more workers knew they had chosen the right path.

“It felt like a boys’ club,” Johnson said, referring to management before workers joined the USW. “Having a union will undercut that.”