There are a lot of "unprecedented" facts and figures spewing out of this triaged economy, but we have come to one of the subtlest and strangest: a wave of paycuts. By mid-May, at least one quarter of S&P 500 companies and 19% of Russell 3000 businesses had given a haircut to senior executives or directors, according to one tally. The salary slimming runs across the spectrum, from small companies to large and from retail to IT.Recently, the list comprised The Container Store Group and Lyft. At Aon, a London-based insurance giant, pay is being halved for top executives and remaining workers are taking a 20% haircut. Historically, executives hate pay cuts about as much as employees, perhaps more. Management best practice has long been to cut positions rather than salaries, on the amorphous theory that fewer workers with mild survivor's guilt are more productive and loyal than a larger pool of pissed-off employees. What's more, the best employees tend to jump ship. With layoffs, however, the goal is "to get the misery out the door," according to Yale economist Truman Bewley. This time, we're keeping misery around, offering it a seat and a drink. It's a weird strategy for strange times. It's also an echo of 2008. In the past decade, finance companies in particular have learned how laborious and expensive it is to find, recruit, hire and train new blood. Here's yet another unprecedented twist: workers seem to be sanguine about it this time around. Perhaps they feel too closely the heat of the dumpster-fire economy and consider it a fair alternative to a pink slip. Perhaps too, they can cast the virus as the bogeyman, rather than the C-suite or the market at-large. Perhaps they just have less power than they've had in years. Either way, the Fed is paying attention, no doubt considering the swooning spending power as it crunches the odds of a V-shaped recovery. Economically, pay cuts are awfully strange, but personally they don't seem like a stretch. We're all getting used to making sacrifices for the good of the whole. | 
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