More than 50% of workers open to pay cuts amid layoffs, study reveals

With many companies scaling back their staffing levels this year, a new study found that more than half of employees would be willing to accept a pay cut to avoid losing their jobs.

According to a survey conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 60 per cent of workers who were recently laid off would have accepted a wage reduction of five per cent.

If steeper cuts were necessary, nearly one-third of respondents claimed that they would have been open to their employer slashing their wages by as much as 25 per cent.

While many employees would be willing to modify their wages when faced with a layoff, the data also revealed that fewer than three per cent of respondents were offered a pay cut to save their job.

“Employer reluctance to offer wage cuts becomes more puzzling in the face of widespread worker willingness to accept them,” the study reads.

“To our knowledge, we are the first to document the disjunction between worker-side openness to wage cuts and a widespread unwillingness of employers to even broach the subject.”

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When asked why their employer didn’t offer a pay cut ahead of layoffs, nearly 39 per cent of workers said they “don’t know.”

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