The poultry pay isn't so paltry.

• Position: Safety program at Keystone Foods Corp.'s Equity Group

Tom Lanier hovers all day over a 27-foot-long vat brimming with superhot oil -- a huge chicken fryer frighteningly similar to one that exploded and sent flames scouring the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet last year.

But that's where most of the similarities end between Imperial Food Products and Lanier's employer, Equity Group of NC.

"Everybody was saying it could have been us," says Lanier, who has worked at Equity's 285-employee Reidsville plant for nine years. "I got to looking around and thought, 'No, it couldn't have been us.'"

The Reidsville plant is the state's only unionized poultry-processing operation, and its sole customer is McDonald's. Because of cooperation between Equity and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, exit doors are kept unlocked, fire drills are held regularly, and fire extinguishers are handy, says Lanier, the union's former shop steward. He estimates that 100,000 pounds of nuggets and patties come out of Reidsville's seven fryers daily.

There's another big difference between Equity and the now-closed Hamlet plant: Reidsville workers earn an average hourly wage of $9.50, vs. the $4.50 that was typical at Imperial. More than 20,000 are employed at North Carolina's 26 poultry-processing plants, earning an average of $7.72 an hour last summer. Union organizing efforts have been defeated at...