by Laura Conaway

We're aiming to talk on the podcast today about the question of layoffs versus pay cuts. Meanwhile, I got this letter from an employer. The business has fewer than 100 workers, and to hear this person tell it, they're all about to make less.

The listener writes:

All of our board members and our outside accountant argued that we risked losing our "best" people if we cut their pay and that we were better off laying off a smaller number and keeping the rest whole.

 

We, the company management and majority owner, argued that we've seen people in our industry recently laid off and not find work at all. These examples are in fact well known to our staff. So, we feel that our read on the job market is such that our best people (the one's we can't afford to lose because of their experience and/or client relationships) won't leave because there is no where they can go and make up the pay difference.

We also felt that the economic conditions being what they are that our staff who have worked together for a long time, would rather share the pain then feel "survivors guilt".

These decisions are purely market driven. In different times during a slow down in work we would do layoff's confident that the people let go could find other work and we would be able to retain those people we wanted to keep. In fact we did lay off a few people several months ago.

These are different times and we convinced our board and accountant that the best way to make up the financial shortfall we are projecting is this unconventional approach. I suspect many people like us are going to make similar decisions and I have already seen job seekers willing to do more for less.