Image via Wikipedia

It seems that all we here of is more and more companies laying people off, my question is why can’t the people at the top just take pay cuts – maybe the CEO’s should make 50,000 or so a year until the crisis’ are over, then they can beef up their income to astronomical figures.

I’m not necessarily railing on Jason Calacanis – But I’m sure he gets paid plenty to do his job, but heaven forbid that when a company is failing the person in charge loses their income, or at least some of their income, instead the innocent worker-bee gets canned.

Same goes for yahoo, and all the other corporations laying people off. I would even submit that laying people off is an UN-AMERICAN thing to do. The country is in a crisis – the more people that lose their job the worse it’s going to get all around – think about it.

If you’re in charge of a company that’s laying people off you are part of the problem not the solution.

Imagine a company has $10,000,000 per year to work with. Has 100 employees, and 10 Executives. Each employee makes $30,000 – a total of $3,000,000. Each executive makes $400,000 ($4,000,000 total). Leaving $3,000,000 for expenses and overhead.

Now profits dry up a bit and things start looking bad, say you need to free up another $300,000, and the easiest way to do that is a 10% layoff plan, or laying off 10 workers.

Now you can be a petty ceo and can the workers, put them on unemployment, and food stamps draining tax dollars and being un-american.

OR…

What if each worker-bee would take a $5,000 paycut to ensure that everyone stays on the payroll – that would be $500,000. $200,000 more than the layoffs. Of course how fair is that?

What if everyone from the top down took a 10% paycut?

Well that would be $3000 for the worker-bees, and $30,000 for the execs. That would amount to: $600,000.

What about cutting workers pay a little more – if they agree to it, in exchange for some stock options for when things look up?

This is a simplified look – there are many other options, but I believe when our country is in dire need – layoffs should not be an option, there’s a better way.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Email From Jason Calacanis: How To Handle Layoffs
• Layoffs Roundup: Comcast’s 300; Ticketmaster’s 300; ManiaTV’s 20; PermissionTV’s 6; Mahalo’s 10
• Internet Winter Hits Mahalo; Cuts 10% Of Staff
• Mahalo feels economic pressure, lays off 10 percent of staff
• Mahalo feels economic pressure, lays off 10 percent of staff
• Tough times, hard decisions. (Jason Calacanis/The Jason Calacanis …)
• Jason Calacanis lays off 13 at Mahalo [Layoffs]
• Mahalo now means “goodbye”
• Merrill Lynch executive to get $10 million golden parachute as company slashes 500 jobs.
• 8 Steps to Unemployment Bliss
• TechCrunch Creates Layoff Tracker
• The Gawker Layoff Tipline
• Four Steps to a Healthy Layoff
• New round of layoffs with Hi5 Adbrite and Yahoo
• New blog is tracking the current web 20 layoffs
• RealNetworks lays off a hundred employees
• Palm laying off employees?
• A recession could be the biggest opportunity for your company ever

More from Theresabloginmysoup

• The upside of massive Foreclosures, who benefits?
• The Top 3 Laws of Professional Blogging.
• Apparently the Discovery Channel and Discovery Educator Networks Have Stooped to Scraping Content…

• The 3 things I learned by following and unfollowing 19,348 people on Twitter. [/caption] Twitter is a mad beast. It can be a tremendous tool, and sometimes a nightmare. I've been using Twitter heavily since March of this year. Following Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble's lead I followed as many people as my little fingers could click. I also followed everyone who......
• 66 ways to get more links - Seriously this is Awesome! Here I am, again I’m starting on April 15th, 2007 from scratch, and this is my Journey to make $1,000,000. Whether or not you think I’ll succeed, I’m going to share each and every step and movement, if you have suggestions for me, I’ll add those on here too, and......
• Why I'm leaving Twitter...Follow me on Plurk! Twitter's death is imminent. Twitter has been great to me. I've met many wonderful people. Build wonderful relationships. But Twitter is now dead to me... Apparently Twitter's new spam measures are blocking a number of users from following other Twitterers. Being able to follow others on twitter is what......
• Calacanis breaks the silence, couldn't go more than 5 weeks could ya?? Image via CrunchBase, source unknown As many of you are aware, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, went into retirement from blogging on July 11th. Claiming he needed to find his new voice, he set out on a quest to build an 'intimate mailing list' to host discussions on. In a recent......
• Patrick Curl's Financial Plan: Capping CEO Pay. I'm gonna make this easy. I thinka CEO is as good as the people beneath him. I believe that he should be paid a multiplier of the average of the employees. Say the multiplier 100, then CEO should be paid 100 times what the average worker makes. If the company......

• Matt Furey: 101 Ways To Magnetize Money Publishers send me books all the time. When I decide to read a book, I earn my Lazy Man moniker by choosing the thinnest book in my pile. Today that book is Matt Furey's 101 Ways To Magnetize Money a book that you may be able to through in about......
• Swine flu update As of Friday, May 8, The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta are reporting 1,639 cases of the H1N1 virus (swine flu) found in 42 states and Washington, D.C. There have also been two deaths, both in Texas. The total number of U.S. confirmed cases has nearly doubled from the......
• Increase Federal Taxation on Gas? What the Hell! This is not so much a personal finance post but rather a rant about those ridiculous people in Washington which will eventually affect every reader's wallet.  I am not sure where I heard it first but it seems that some smart people in Washington think nowis the time to increase the federally......
• Will you be broke come retirement? While no one would say I am a financial genius (except me), I do try to keep up on what is going on in the money world. I subscribe to many financial blogs, and I really like this one: Free Money Finance. They do a great job of keeping me......
• Introduction to the IRA The IRA is an Individual Retirement Account that was originally created by the United States Congress as a means of providing retirement savings with tax advantages to workers that were not already being covered under an employer-sponsored retirement plan. Unlike the standard 401(k) plan, the purpose of an IRA is......