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"If you need to get rid of 2 million in salary it's faster to get rid of guys making 50 grand than guys making 30."

Yes,this is a sad but true fact. We should call it the Iron Law of Lay-offs or something. Plus, you really need the low paid people to "turn the lights on and off". My office is in a super cash crunch, and I ran all sorts of numbers. I even considered cutting all salaries by 10%, but we would have saved no more money than we would just by getting rid of one mid-level admin person. The advantages of getting rid of one person are many, first of all, if we cut all salaries, the whole place would know what a struggle we are in, and some might look for jobs, and some might find them and leave; moral would be adversly affected; we'd disrupt 25 lives instead of 1.

This is not pleasant, even Mr. Burns would not enjoy it. I, for one, really need the economy to turn around NOW! I make very good money at my job, I doubt I'd be able to get a new job that pays the same. Plus, I don't want my company to go under.

We had to go through some pretty brutal cuts at my last company (I survived to but not through the last one), and I saw some great guys cut purely by salary. It's one of those nasty decisions, on the one hand you know the guy is one of your best, but you'd have to lay off two people to make a similar dollar cut (well usually it's like a 5 people or 3 people kind of thing) and he's not two people good so "orph with 'is 'ead".

For something like the CC thing I'm sure they looked at tenure as that pushes the base salary up, then you have to look at department averages are they just in a department that moves product well. I feel for the guy, but by the same token he should have seen the righting on the wall, CC has been quite publicly in bad shape for a while.