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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.

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