About sixty poultry workers worked their last shift Friday at Nadeau Poultry in northwest New Brunswick.

The job losses are part of an ongoing dispute between two rival chicken processing companies.

Nadeau, located in Saint-François, near Edmundston, processes thousands of chicken every hour, but as of Friday, it eliminated its second shift because it can't get enough chickens.

Melanie Dube, one of the laid off workers, said it's difficult.

"We have bills to pay, we have kids. It's hard, emotionally and physically. It's hard for everybody," she said.

Local chicken farmers and their company, Groupe Westco, have stopped selling birds to Nadeau. Since September, 2009, Westco diverted all of its chickens from Nadeau Poultry, which was processing the chickens, to their partner Olymel’s plant in Quebec.

Westco wanted to buy the Nadeau plant, but was turned down. So, they're building their own facility, just down the road. In the meantime, they're shipping their birds to the Quebec plant.

Nadeau currently has the only chicken plant in New Brunswick and once controlled all processing.The company already laid off 175 employees in 2009.

Westco has offered jobs to Nadeau employees like Dube. But she said she would never work there because she's loyal to Nadeau.

"They've always have been there to support us, and I've always been there to support them, too," Dube said. "So, I'm going to be there till the end of it."

But some Nadeau workers are ready to switch, according to Westco CEO Thomas Soucy.

"We already have 70 applications of people from Nadeau that applied here, and we haven't even started the actual hiring process yet," he said.

If Nadeau can't find a new supply of chickens, it could shut down as early as June.

Nadeau has argued that under Canada's supply management system, the chickens had to stay in New Brunswick for processing.

A federal competition tribunal disagreed, and the Federal Court of Appeal upheld that. The company then filed an appeal with the Supreme Court of Canada which refused to hear the case.