[lukan]

" to ensure that the total operational cost of hiring people to do these terrible jobs is much higher than using robots."

He was not crushed by machinery or anything:

"Dariusz worked so hard. His job used to be done by a few people during a shift, but then they made him do all that work alone, pushing around trolleys with heavy boxes."

He was simply pushed working too hard. So a robot doing the job would have been one solution - the other simply an extra human helping, or switching tasks, to something less physically demanding.

[polarix]

True! There might be other solutions, like having management treat people as they themselves would want to be treated. That kind of thing just sounds fairly unrealistic.