A lot of business strategy these days tend to forget that their labor are often their customers in a somewhat symbiotic relationship. This was part of the realization Henry Ford had when developing Ford motors and during the heydays of labor rights.
Cut your labor and you strangle your customer base. Now we're seeing a tendency of businesses focusing on more wealthy clients, luxury goods, etc. Some modern mall strategies are gearing at primarily targeting luxury stores vs appealing to the masses because the mass labor force purses are growing ever tighter (mainly because they're emptying).
Seems like a natural progression as the "wealth trickle" progresses more and more to a drought and pools up at the top in guarded reservoirs away from the majority: the labor force.
It's one thing to automate away tasks people don't want to do and replace those tasks with tasks people do want to do (and get paid for). It's an entirely different story when you eliminate work and provide no alternatives, displacing large segments of the population, then simply accumulate the labor cost savings for your business and chief investors while stagnating growth.
Most counter arguments to this trend point at historic technological shifts where new industry popped up to supply alternative means of living for the labor force. This makes an assumption that the change is the same and ignores the trends, hand waving it away in ambiguous complexity and proposing we play the experiment out. Most wanting to play the experiment out have little to lose and much to gain. The other side have a lot to lose and relatively little to gain.
We're seeing a lot more of businesses pooling cash and asset reserves and not reinvesting them back into society and people are starting to get a bit cranky about it.