Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t have to choose one. With automation you can have a small, highly paid, highly skilled workforce do the work of a much larger, low skill, low paid workforce and actually produce higher quality products at a lower price.
And what about the highly skilled lower paid workforce also using automation in China? And with fewer safety requirements the machines are cheaper too.
The problem with automation is it is very hard to make it, but once it is made you can use it cheap. So you need to make many parts before it is worth it. 30 years ago it's was cheaper to pay a skilled lathe operator to turn a drawing into a single part, but if you needed 1000 it was worth writing CNC code to automate it. Today the state of CAM is such that many drawings can be turned into parts CNC directly, but assembly of those parts into a tool is often still manual unless they sell a lot of parts. (I don't know what Milwaukee is doing, but I expect cordless drills are assembled automatically, but their cordless bandsaw which is much less in demand is manual)