I really, really love this, good for these guys and I sincerely hope it spreads to other industries where some eager beaver bucking for promotion tries the same bullshit. I especially love the early retirements, the nitwits who approved this are soon going to find out exactly how much it takes to train a green worker to take anyone's place, even if they try to bump everybody up a level. They're still going to have to train people for those specialized jobs.
And that doesn't figure in the 10% loss in purchasing power of the guys who hung on while working 10% fewer hours on the clock for that 10% pay cut. Pay cuts go all through the economy just like pay raises do and with the same ripple effect. That means there were likely some staycations instead of road trips so the company sold less gas.
So productivity dropped, recruitment and training costs skyrocketed, and they sold less of their product. Dumbasses thought this was the 80s. They were SO wrong.
A study was done of corporations in the late 90s, those that laid off workers to goose their stock prices back in the 80s did much worse than those who took losses for a few months to keep their full workforce intact during slack periods. I guess these bozos didn't bother to read it.
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