The fight to unionize the South brews at an N.C. slaughterhouse

Three Robeson County Sheriff cars idle in a dirt lot in front of the windowless Mountaire chicken processing plant and slaughterhouse about 80 miles southwest of Raleigh.

Semi-trucks full of live chickens barrel through the chain-link entrance and over the railroad tracks; trucks carrying empty cages exit the plant. Mountaire's Lumber Bridge plant employs 2,000 people, and supplies a variety of chicken breast products for companies like Subway, Lunchables and Buffalo Wild Wings, as well as international clients in Brazil and China.

The deputies look on as several carloads of yellow-clad black and Latino union employees and organizers park at the convenience store across the street and tromp across the road, chanting Everywhere we go / people want to know / who we are / where we come from / We are the union / the mighty mighty union.

The picketers, from United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1208, have arrived to protest Mountaire's alleged harassment and intimidation of pro-union workers within the poultry plant. They were leafleting at 4 in the morning. The fliers they pass out announce an upcoming information session in Fayetteville in English and Spanish: We know the company is trying to scare and confuse you. DON'T FALL FOR IT! Come & bring your questions on the 16th and find out the truth.

Drivers blare their horns and wave in support. Latino workers in a beat-up car stop to chat and ask questions before driving off. One woman in a hairnet and white scrubs walking across the street to get lunch at the convenience store gives a thumbs up, saying she plans to attend the session in Fayetteville.

Outside the Mountaire factory gates, I meet a woman named Delcia Rodriguez. A 23-year-old UFCW organizer from the Dominican Republic, Rodriguez worked at the Mountaire plant until 2011, when, she says, she was hit in the stomach by a large bucket used to haul meat and had a miscarriage in the plant. A doctor told her that she needed to take time off to rest. When she brought the doctor's note to Mountaire's Human Resources department, she says she was ordered to turn in her ID and fired.

"The supervisors treat the people, especially the non-English people, like animals," Rodriguez said. "They don't care if you get hurt."

Six months later, Rodriguez got a job at the unionized Smithfield plant. "I love the union. The union is the best thing that has happened in my life."

UFCW is the second-largest non-public sector union in the country, with 1.3 million members across various food-related industries: slaughterhouses, meat processing and grocery stores. UFCW Local 1208, based in Tar Heel, N.C., is legendary in the labor world for winning a grueling 17-year organizing campaign against Smithfield Foods in 2008. The 5,000-employee Smithfield pork slaughterhouse, located just outside of Tar Heel, N.C., is the largest pork-processing slaughterhouse in the world.

Keith Ludlum, UFCW Local 1208's president, is a Desert Storm veteran and native of eastern Carolina. He was fired from Smithfield for organizing in 1994; it took him 12 years in federal courts to get his job reinstated with back pay. "Anything they could use to fight the workers from forming a union, they did it. They violated the laws egregiously," Ludlum says. A union culture has become firmly entrenched in the Smithfield factory; that's why Local 1208 feels comfortable starting a campaign to unionize Mountaire, about 20 minutes away.

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The fight to unionize the South brews at an N.C. slaughterhouse