If you insist on driving your games to completion, there will come a point at which automating workers is the simplest move to get you a quick (real-time) win. That's about the same point at which many players just declare a game "won" and move on to the next though. Whatever floats your boat; it's not like there's much in the way of "strategy" to be discussed from there anyways unless you're going for a high score (in which case, obviously, automating workers is a bad idea).
Intelligently managing workers is probably the single biggest thing you can do to boost your chances of winning, so automating them while the outcome of the game is at all in doubt is a terrible move.
Intelligently managing workers is probably the single biggest thing you can do to boost your chances of winning, so automating them while the outcome of the game is at all in doubt is a terrible move.