Agreed, and companies do that. If they don't treat employees well, people leave, retraining or lost "tribal knowledge" cost hurt, quality drops, customers are unhappy, etc - it all balances over time. The problem starts when you get a union involved, so you don't get to reward increased skill set or productivity but instead of have to stick to "higher seniority, higher benefit" and "everyone at the same seniority is interchangeable". This increases costs of retention by orders of magnitude. For example, if you get an employee who learns fast, works great, in order to pay him (or her) so he doesn't leave to the next company you have to pay everyone else at their seniority and above more money, then the comparison is not "pay this employee $10K per year more so he or she sticks around" it's "raise everyone's pay $10K or more to the few good ones don't leave" so if you have 50,000 employees, it's not worth paying the extra half a billion per year to retain few, but wait, that's a decent chunk of change that could decently affect the "cost" of the "cost vs. benefit" of automation.
Absolutely agree on that one. It's a ludicrous argument from for an employer to make. It really should be "if you don't like it here, feel free to leave". If low retention becomes a costly issue to the company, they have to solve it, and if automation is more expensive than keeping people, then they usually do. Btw, if labor laws are being violated (e.g. safety issues), go to the labor board - that is what they are for (labor laws are some of the strongest in CA).
When it makes financial sense, as you said earlier. And yes, you have to pay those people more than the people who are replaced, but in return you hope to get higher productivity per person, higher quality/repeat-ability and scalability.
Unless you have a union, which can become a significant multiplier to those costs.
Agreed.