Within the next ten years Rossum's Universal Robots will produce so much wheat, so much cloth, so much everything that things will no longer have any value. Everyone will be able to take as much as he needs.—Karel Čapek, R.U.R.
I think that manufacturing plant remains the largest employer of humans I've ever worked in. Not because we don't build big anymore, but because we don't need as many people to do it. Certainly not all in one place, anyway.
Automation was already making inroads in the auto industry, where repetitive, semi-skilled labor was unionized and expensive. A crude robot could replace a union worker on three shifts without a break, and eight robots required only one non-union human supervisor. The accountants were happy. The line workers, less so. Eventually entire factories were closed down, automated, and reopened with minimal human staff. Thousands of manufacturing jobs disappeared, permanently.
That pattern continued and spread worldwide over the next half-century. Innovators improved the robots, making them cheaper and more capable. I did my bit on that, mostly in creating lighter and stronger materials, but I had a lot of colleagues. Robot vacuum cleaners were just the first step in making 'bots domestically ubiquitous. It wasn't long until small businesses and garage-level inventors could afford robots for their own assembly lines.
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