A friend of mine is a Mashgiach for a large Kashrus organization, and was once sent to China. He has many fascinating stories to tell from just that one trip. One of them is very relevant as one possible answer to this question.
He visited a factory that uses cabbage to manufacture some food ingredient. Trucks come in the gate of the factory and stop near the building. A man then unloads the cabbage from the truck and carries it 20 feet to a hopper, where he dumps them in to begin the processing. He asked the boss why he doesn’t just install a conveyor belt that goes from the trucks to the hopper?
He answered that a conveyor belt would cost $12,000 and if it broke down, the entire production would be held up while waiting for repair or parts. The man OTOH gets paid $100 per month (!) and he can therefore feed a man and his family for ten years for the same cost as the conveyor belt. (No payroll tax or health benefits obviously.) And if the man should break his leg and be unable to work? The boss pointed to gate of the factory, where a few poor unemployed men hung around all day, just waiting for that to happen so that they could immediately replace him.
So ironically, in this model, people are cheaper than machines! And the factory owner is a hero for employing people instead of replacing them with machines.