Beginning in September, the UK car plants of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) stood still for five weeks. Production halted in its factories, and those that manufacture the specialist components it uses, with knock-on effects for the myriad of jobs that rely on car manufacturing in the surrounding plants in the West Midlands and Merseyside.
The stoppage was not caused by militant industrial action, as seen in the 1970s, but was the consequence of a cyberattack. The impact of the shutdown shows how important just one company’s car manufacturing is to the UK economy. The UK’s third-quarter growth rate fell to 0.1%, from 0.3%.
Under pressure from both workers in the industry and the interests of the British capitalist class in maintaining the automotive industry, the Starmer-led government was forced to act. It stopped short of the demand from unions to introduce a furlough scheme – the government maintaining workers’ wages while production was stopped. Many workers at JLR and its supply companies were instead encouraged to use annual leave. Many engineers found other jobs in the meantime, meaning now production has restarted companies are having to rely on agency staff to fill those gaps.
The government instead offered an emergency £1.5 billion loan, unused at the time of writing since JLR used its £6 billion cash reserves to tide itself over as it lost £5 million a day from sales while cars were not being produced. The situation for smaller supplies is very different, with many expected to see difficulties in the coming months as delays to payments and sales hit. For all workers effected by the fallout, unions must take action to make sure no jobs are lost and to demand that the government nationalises any companies that go under as a result.
This incident draws attention to the integral role computer systems play in modern production. When workers at JLR discovered the hack, all their computer systems had to be shut down. This included the invoicing, payment and order tracking systems; Computer-Aided Design software used in development; and the systems which operate the robotics which operate alongside workers on the factory production lines. Quoted in The Guardian, one engineer described JLR’s software as “probably more complex than Nasa putting a spacecraft into space”.
Photos of modern production lines show workers alongside robotic arms, vast machines and conveyor belts. The capitalists have not automated away the working class on the factory floor, these machines still need to be monitored and maintained. And in many cases, for the capitalists who make decisions about investment and production design based on what will maximise their profits, it is still more profitable for them to rely on low-paid workers to do jobs that would require large amounts of investment to automate. Still, with advances in technology and automated production becoming both cheaper and more reliant on other systems, the number of machines that depend on the internet is rising.
Research by Cybersecurity company Bitsight found that the amount of operational technology exposed to the public internet, ie the machines themselves, and industrial control systems – the software that operates them – increased by 12% in 2024. More than 180,000 new devices became visible every month, expected to rise to 200,000 in 2025. This represents bosses automating production and distribution systems, but that comes with increased risk of cyberattacks.
The complexity and scale of the impact of the shutdown is in part due to the interconnectedness of the computing systems used in modern production. Advances in computing over decades have meant supply chains can be managed with more moving parts than was previously economical. Replacing the – at one point literal – paper trails with automated computing systems for invoicing suppliers and making deliveries to customers has enabled supply chains that criss-cross the world.
At the same time as JLR dealt with its cyberattack, beverage manufacturer Asahi Superdry also shut down production in Japan due to a hack of its own. Faced with a shortage of beer that meant empty supermarket shelves, Asahi dispatched workers with clipboards and paper invoices to its suppliers and buyers to keep the taps on. What was possible dealing with a single domestic market and the relatively simple production process of manufacturing beer would have been impossible for the automotive industry.
Automotive manufacturers operate ‘just in time’ production. Vehicles are made up of tens of thousands of individual components, many of which are specialised to the degree that they are suitable for just one manufacturer. To maximise profit, instead of storing components – often large and bulky – in warehouses, which carry with them additional costs, components arrive at factories ‘just in time’ for them to enter the production line. Under normal circumstances, this technology increases the efficiency of production by eliminated wastage. However, as JLR has shown, it makes those supply chains more fragile, as if a major piece is knocked out there isn’t the spare capacity to continue production.
The interconnectedness of production, both within a large multinational company and smaller suppliers that rely on it, reveals the nature of production within the capitalist system writ large. Production is socially organised – no one worker is responsible for making a single car by extracting the raw materials from the earth then manufacturing and combining all the parts into the commodity that is sold on the market. Workers take part in the production process together, each contributing a small part. They sell their labour in exchange for wages while the capitalist class, who own the factories, machinery, software etc own the final product – a commodity which is then sold for profit.
It is the capitalist bosses that make the decisions about how things are produced, whereas the working class has to face the consequences of this. In the case of JLR, the decision not to take out insurance against cyberattacks was not made by workers in the factories but by bosses attempting to cut costs.
The socialist transformation of society would resolve the contradiction of social production and private ownership of the means of production by taking them into public hands and planning production democratically. Production under the capitalist system already has a large degree of planning – the firms which supply the parts for JLR show this. Their specialist parts aren’t put on the market to be bought by whoever wants them. They’re specially manufactured to specifications supplied by JLR and only used for their vehicles.
The cyberattack on JLR has also revealed, in a distorted way, the power that workers still have in society. Workers withdrawing their labour and stopping the bosses’ ability to make profits has an even bigger impact than a computer virus. Workers can spread their action, not through email attachments, but through solidarity action to widen a strike against the bosses who are their shared enemy. And, crucially, it has exposed that new layers of workers hold enormous power. The workers that maintain the computer systems, including the electricity and internet required to run them, are an integral part of production. Action by these workers can win improvements from the bosses if it is organised collectively.
The response of companies to cyberattacks shows one of the ways that capitalist production holds back new technologies and automations being fully realised to improve all our lives. The extent of the hack, what systems were affected, and how, is kept tightly under wraps. Information about how production is organised is a corporate secret, kept protected to hinder other firms competing for profit.
Taking production out of the hands of the capitalist class and democratically planning production would enable the advances in new technology to be properly utilised. Decisions about automation investment would be based on what reduces wastage and work, enabling a shorter working week and raising the standard of living of the majority of society. Productive and storage capacity could be shared out, instead of owned and controlled by competing companies. And by removing that competition, the wastage inherent within capitalism, with workers doing the same work unnecessarily, or scientists and technicians researching the same problem but unable to make their findings common knowledge due to the need to make a profit from their advances by the bosses, could be removed.
Mark Best