I'd be on board if we had seen investment over the last five years flood away from labor towards equipment and technology. But we didn't, we saw 20-30% reductions in spending on nonresidential equipment and software.[1][2] Declines in purchases of non-labor productive capital were far steeper than reductions labor (they're just harder to see for the average person).
It wasn't labor vs. equipment this time, the decline in labor was mostly driven by the decline in consumption.
I'm not sure there's strong consensus to explain the decline in consumption. One theory is that the decline in consumption happened primarily because households woke up one morning and realized that they were broke from years of credit card debt and housing investment [3], but there are a million other theories.
On the whole though, I don't think you find better worker conditions in agricultural societies. Medieval Europe and North Korea come to mind. Backbreaking labor all day for the privilege of regular mass famines... I don't think it's for me.
[1] http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/events/2013/january/f...
[2] http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_displa...
[3] http://www.perpustakaan.depkeu.go.id/FOLDERJURNAL/w17830.pdf
Ironically vacation days was also much, much better than we have today. In an agricultural society, you'd probably have ~100 vacation days a year (in trade for having to work weekends - but not sundays) for 4-5 weeks twice a year.
I'm a big fan of economic history as a discipline, if you have anything to recommend, I'd love to check it out.
UPDATE: I found one research paper claiming that "The statistical record reveals a high and growing labor force to population ratio in America for most of the last two centuries." http://economics.ucr.edu/papers/papers03/03-13.pdf
I don't take that to have settled the question, I'd like to go back further, and make sure we properly account for the reversal of this trend between the 1930s and the 1960s. But it certainly is a provocative set of data.
And people are getting displaced in the service industry too, and there is nothing even pretending to replace the service industry. People go from A -> B -> C -> D, with A agro, B industry, C services and D ... well there is no D.