surviving the recession

We’ve has lots of instances of employers asking employees to take a pay cut or unpaid leave in order to cut costs and save jobs. British Airways announced that a lot of their staff had volunteered for the unpaid leave option, and British Telecom has announced that their staff are also going to take a 5% paycut in the form of unpaid leave.

These kinds of situations leave the employee between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand it’s better to have a job at lower pay than no job at all. On the other hand, these things have been tried by desperate companies before, and you end up with lower pay for a while, and then the company goes bust, and your redundancy payment is based on the lower pay. So you lose out even worse.

What should you do in this situation? Well good employees will get jobs no matter what the situation is. So if your company has asked you to take a pay cut, you may feel you have to agree, but then get out your CV and start seeing if you can apply for jobs at your old rate of pay or better.

Also use the unpaid leave to start earning a new second stream of income, whether it is working part-time in a bar or earning online. The fact is that in these days of recession, you can’t rely on any employer at all. It won’t be long before we are all self-employed at this rate.