JBS plants jump back to work after cyberattack
Meat processing company, JBS SA’s workers after returning to a meat-processing plant in Texas on Wednesday afternoon, were briefed to be prepared to do things a bit differently than normal, that is, work by hand.
With everything ranging from knife sharpening to production-line speed controls depending on automation, returning from a cyberattack that led the world’s largest meat producer to stop its operations across the world is not going to be an easy ride.
Now that the plants are returning online with an absence of some of their systems in service, there is going to be a lot more manual work than usual.
Wendell Young, head of the United Food and Commercial Workers’ local union representing 1,500 members at JBS’s beef slaughterhouse in Souderton, Pennsylvania said, “There’s a lot of automation, there’s a lot of reliance on technology. You can disconnect some of those wires and switches and run things old-school, but before you do, you want to make sure that everything’s running smoothly.”