More than one in four jobs in Brooks, Alta., could have at least 70 per cent of human tasks replaced by machines
A radio disc jockey interrupts the country music playing to an empty room at Ricky’s All Day Grill in Brooks, Alta. He wants to take a minute, he says, to recognize Gissela Ramirez, a recruiting supervisor who left her corporate law gig in Guadalajara, Mexico, to work at the slaughterhouse and beef-packing plant in Brooks. The facility, owned by the world’s largest beef-processing company, Brazil-based JBS, is the biggest employer in town.
At the same time, however, the company has deployed millions of dollars to develop robot butchers — technology that could someday replace the workforce it’s building up. JBS personnel would not let The Logic inside the facility, and its Calgary-based president, David Colwell, also declined an interview request. When asked about the automation at the plant, a spokesperson based in Colorado said in an email that “current automation in the Brooks facility is limited,” but that the company is “constantly seeking ways to enhance innovation and improve worker safety and overall performance through the use of automation.
“Some of the stuff they do is an art,” Morishita says of the plant workers at JBS. “But I can see when, at some point, the return on investment on automation does make sense.” “There was a lot of uncertainty during that time,” says Morishita. “It was scary. It was very scary. The scope and scale of the economic devastation would have been immeasurable — we couldn’t even imagine it at the time.”
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