Hate to say this but what a big blob of BS because the ownership class find out pretty early that if no one else is making money to buy the shits they make, they can’t make more money. (We will skip the pre 1900 slavery scenario, as they can just force you to work and just keep you alive is enough as slaves are “production equipment” like cows/horses. )

People generate value if they do or make something other people want, currency invented to cover that value gap so supply, demand, skill and rarity, efficiency and many different quality of your work/product/service decides how many $ you get when people want your service. At least, that’s how it all should be in equal footing. But since money == power when the scale goes up, since ancient time successful merchants holds a lot influence in politics and cause unbalance in wealth distribution. They can only push it so far until they get hunting down and stuff taken, but usually by other influential political/business figures that does the raids.

Having said the above, a lot of small and medium scale business owners values their employees a lot, especially those that truly have the skill set that compliments their business. And, do I need to remind you to do a bit of study of history, the invention of machines, tele-communication and then the boom of computers(especially general purpose ones), yet global population keeps going up and up instead of all starved to death cause the jobs these past things replaced?

And, just to do a quick review of how much people hates the automated phone support menu system transition from traditional to modern voice recognition ones. Or how many internet goer hates the auto generated useless pages plague our search result and provide nothing useful, waste our time click and read just to serve some ads? Yeah, like many worried before, what if computer replaced our jobs? Well, they need people to make the computer work. AI isn’t going to be fully automated and self improve, we are pretty far from that. many successful model needs guided training, and usually prevents additional feedback into the system to avoid degrading the performance.