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"We should be scared of unions and minimum wages because they'll cause faster automation" is one of the wackiest takes I regularly see on this website.
Imagine being scared of policies that raise wages because those policies might also cause faster technological progress.
Imagine being scared of policies that raise wages because those policies might also cause faster technological progress.
If robots are going to make some segment of the populace totally unemployable, and unions accelerate that process by a few years, what we need is not de-unionization, it's Universal Basic Income. Because in that case, the robots WILL be take over soon enough no matter what.
That said, Germany, Japan, Sweden and Denmark have a lot more robots than we do, plus stronger unions, and their human workers aren't going obsolete, so I'd say that if this is a worry, it's a worry for the far future. 
