Nearly 1,000 mostly Hispanic employees staged a two-day walkout of a North Carolina plant in November, upset that Smithfield Foods Inc. fired 50 or so people in a crackdown on undocumented workers at the world's biggest hog slaughterhouse. Union officials who have struggled without success for more than a decade to organize the plant quickly threw their support to the Hispanic workers, recognizing that the crackdown and others like it around the country represent a new opportunity for the labor movement to boost membership.
See "Unions See Opportunity at N.C. Plant", Associated Press, The New York Times, November 29, 2006