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> Would people here take a 10% pay cut if it meant their colleagues weren’t fired? I knew a few people who went through this at the beginning of covid. One ca

> Would people here take a 10% pay cut if it meant their colleagues weren’t fired? I knew a few people who went through this at the beginning of covid. One case, a friend had just been hired in Feb 2020. March/April, everything went sideways. May, they announced a 10% pay cut to everyone (owners may have taken larger cut), with promise to get back to original pay by end of 2021. That seems a long time, but at the time of that plan, there were just so many unknowns. They did end up getting rid of a couple of folks later in 2020, but they were sort of 'on the cards' before covid, and they weren't wanting to fire folks right as this pandemic was starting. Small company (~50 people, IIRC) and it just felt too personal at the start of the pandemic. They also got everyone back to original pay by Q2 2021 - ahead of schedule. Other was family member - CFO-level. Company had everyone take 10% pay cut - SVP and C-suite took 30% cut. They rode that out for more than a year, and I think got 'back' to early 2020 levels by end of 2021. Neither of those are great options, but we had a pretty big global problem going on that few could escape. Would I do it? If I knew it was 10% across the board (and/or even more for C-level), yes, I'd support that sort of a move, to prevent layoffs. I would also like to know the timeline that was in place. I freelance, and early 2021, a client 'slowed' down work. I'd been ~20/hrs/week - that go reduced to ~5, but... there was no communication (to me) about expected timeline. Had I known it was only scheduled for a quarter, I would have relaxed a bit. I didn't, and took on other work, then initial client ramped back up and I was... overwhelmed. A bit of communication goes a long way.

cableshaft 4y ago
The beginning of Covid was somewhat of a unique time. It made sense to accept wage cuts because the entire world economy was a big question mark at the time, and the likelihood of you finding another job at that point wasn't great. My own partner accepted getting cut down to only two workdays a week at 40% of her pay, for over six months, before she finally found another job. She would have been better off furloughed like most of the rest of the company (they were in the events industry, the company made almost $0 revenue in 2020) because she would have been eligible for the extra unemployment. But I think a 10% across the board wage cut is risky when you're not in the midst of a big recession/depression. You'll have your best employees that could have probably left and gotten a 10-20% increase elsewhere already, have now lost 10% of their wages at your company and now can get a 20%-30% bump if they leave. People won't be loyal and stay just because you're hurting the company evenly. Speaking from experience, at a previous company we had frozen raises and removed 401k match and worse healthcare and we saw steady and significant attrition just from that. Cut salary by 10% would probably have similar results.
- lowercased 4y ago
  I guess/thought the context of this was around 'big economic events' like people are predicting for 2023 - big economic downturn/recession. I generally agree that it's not something most people would be on board with most of the time. Extreme/national/global circumstances, yeah. If few are hiring, everything's paused, etc... taking 10% pay cut seems reasonable. If the cuts are just because the company isn't run very well... yeah... move on to something else if you can.

cableshaft 4y ago

The beginning of Covid was somewhat of a unique time. It made sense to accept wage cuts because the entire world economy was a big question mark at the time, and the likelihood of you finding another job at that point wasn't great. My own partner accepted getting cut down to only two workdays a week at 40% of her pay, for over six months, before she finally found another job. She would have been better off furloughed like most of the rest of the company (they were in the events industry, the company made almost $0 revenue in 2020) because she would have been eligible for the extra unemployment. But I think a 10% across the board wage cut is risky when you're not in the midst of a big recession/depression. You'll have your best employees that could have probably left and gotten a 10-20% increase elsewhere already, have now lost 10% of their wages at your company and now can get a 20%-30% bump if they leave. People won't be loyal and stay just because you're hurting the company evenly. Speaking from experience, at a previous company we had frozen raises and removed 401k match and worse healthcare and we saw steady and significant attrition just from that. Cut salary by 10% would probably have similar results.

lowercased 4y ago
I guess/thought the context of this was around 'big economic events' like people are predicting for 2023 - big economic downturn/recession. I generally agree that it's not something most people would be on board with most of the time. Extreme/national/global circumstances, yeah. If few are hiring, everything's paused, etc... taking 10% pay cut seems reasonable. If the cuts are just because the company isn't run very well... yeah... move on to something else if you can.