The meat of the matter: the labor movement's future might hang on what happens at this giant packing plant near the tiny town of Tar Heel.

• Author: Maley, Frank

Hermillio Sosa steps into the pulpit of First Baptist Church in Fayetteville, ready to tell his story but unable to speak many words his audience will understand. Beside him, a man repeats his Spanish sentences in English for the congregation, most of it black. They're here on the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., shot dead 40 years ago on a visit to support striking sanitation workers in Memphis.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Today, the faithful are joined by the fretful: roughly 50 workers from a slaughterhouse about 20 miles south near the Bladen County town of Tar Heel. They're easy to tell from the regulars by bright yellow T-shirts that say Justice @ Smithfield. Many wear jeans and athletic shoes. It's not what most consider church attire, but they're here to rally support for organizing their workplace, the world's largest pork-processing plant. It's hard to look oppressed in your Sunday best.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Sosa's story is short, the narrative choppy. He started working at Smithfield Packing in 1998. A few years ago, he joined a work stoppage to protest how fast production lines moved. Some who participated were fired. He ends with a word that needs no translation. "Gracias." On cue, the audience bursts into applause. Most of the plant's 5,000 workers are black, but more than a quarter are Latino. This, the speakers who preceded him have hammered, is a cause they all share. The event lauds not only King but also Cesar Chavez. Scenes from both men's lives flash on the wall behind the choir.

Public-relations spectacles like this are skirmishes in the nearly 16-year battle for the plant by Smithfield Foods Inc., based in the Virginia town from which it takes its name, and the Washington, D.C.-based United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Stakes are high for both sides, and the outcome will have effects far beyond the company, the union and plant employees.

With union membership continuing its long decline and representation of the U.S. work force dwindling--from 23% in 1983 to 13% in 2007--the labor movement needs a big win. There would be no sweeter place to get it than North Carolina, the least unionized state in the nation. "This is one of the largest industrial plants in the South," says Robert Korstad, associate professor of public policy studies and history at Duke University. "It's symbolic to the union movement. If they're able to win there, it sends a real signal to other workers in other industries."

For Smithfield, a union in Tar Heel could expose the Achilles' heel of the business model that made the company the world's largest hog producer and pork processor. "They figure if they can get that done, it will be a catapult into other industry in North Carolina and South Carolina," says Joe Luter IV, president of The Smithfield Packing Co., the subsidiary that runs the plant. "Then they'll move on down the Southeast into Georgia, Alabama, etcetera."

"If the labor movement can't win the South, we can't succeed," Gene Bruskin, director of the union campaign, told Labor Notes magazine, adding: "The Tar Heel plant is big enough and important enough and close enough to other places that it has the possibility of moving other people. The possibilities of organizing packinghouse workers would be transformative to the labor movement, for immigrants, for African American workers, for the South."

The UFCW has been trying to organize the Tar Heel plant since 1992, the year it opened. There have been longer campaigns in North Carolina and a few that involved more workers, says James Andrews, president of the state AFL-CIO in Raleigh. "But at least in recent history, I can't think of a worse situation." Hourly employees twice have voted on whether...