Have large scale wage cuts begun yet in developed economies around the world?
It is difficult for companies to implement wage cuts on existing employees and make them stick long term. What usually happens is that management reduces the number of workers and makes them work longer hours. Since most people in the U.S. are in salaried jobs, and they are putting in longer hours for the same pay, this amounts to a reduction in their hourly pay. Ideally, it would make sense to come up with ways to make the existing workforce work more efficiently, but it is difficult to put this into practice. So management simply asks workers to do more with less, and since the workers don’t want to lose their jobs, they just suck it up and do it. The upside of this is that when economic times pick up, workers can start asking for more money and get it, since management doesn’t want trained staff to go out the door. It usually takes a lot of time and effort on the employer’s part to make an employee productive, so they have a vested interest in keeping them and are willing to give co
