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.
Automation is far from unpaid. At very least it expects you to give it food (electricity, gasoline, etc.), shelter, and healthcare (repairs and maintenance). Generally the same things that humans expect from you.
Automation is significant not because it is unpaid, but because it can often do much more work for the same amount of pay.
Having 10 skilled people and 100 robots do what 1000 people would otherwise do isn't some defeat, it's fantastic. Productivity is what makes people rich in the long term.
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)