"Management put a process in place to drive down wages, arguing that if the process is robust enough, then they do not need to employ highly-skilled or educated workers..."

Can't say that I agree with that take, at least not in the company that I'm at. We're relatively light on process, but the ones that are there were put in place to ensure that smart people don't waste their time chasing "Who's got the login for...?" and "Can someone explain how to...?" style questions.

Process at its best is like a project's coding standards doc. It gets the mind-numbingly common, time-consuming debates out of the way so that people can focus on the genuinely tough problems. Like coding standards, though, process can get out of control and take a life of its own, burying people in busy-work.