Once considered risky, pay cuts hitting workers more frequently

MECHANICSVILLE, VA. - The dark blue captain's hat, with its golden oak-leaf clusters, sits atop a bookcase in Bryan Lawlor's home, out of reach of the children. The uniform their father wears still displays the four stripes of a commercial airline captain, but the hat stays home. The rules forbid that extra display of authority, now that Lawlor has been downgraded to first officer.

He's now in the co-pilot's seat in the 50-seat commuter jets he flies, but not for any failure in skill. He wears his captain's stripes, he explains, to make that point. But with air travel down, his employer cut costs by downgrading 130 captains, those with the lowest seniority, to first officers, automatically cutting the wage of each by roughly 50 percent -- to $34,000 in Lawlor's case.

The demotion, the loss of command, the cut in pay to less than his wife, Tracy, makes as a fourth-grade teacher, have diminished Lawlor in his own eyes. He still thinks he will return to being the family's principal breadwinner, although as the months pass he worries more. "I don't want to be a 50-year-old pilot earning $40,000 a year," he said, adding that his wife does not want to be married to a pilot with so little earning power.

Falling, falling, falling

In recent decades, layoffs were the standard procedure for shrinking labor costs. Reducing the wages of those who remained on the job was considered demoralizing and risky: The best workers would jump to another employer. But now pay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression.

State workers in Georgia are taking home smaller paychecks. So are the tens of thousands of employees in California's public university system. The steel company Nucor and the technology giant Hewlett-Packard have embraced the practice. So have several airlines and many small businesses.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track pay cuts, but it suggests they are reflected in the steep decline of another statistic: total weekly pay for production workers, pilots among them, representing 80 percent of the work force. That index has fallen for nine consecutive months, an unprecedented string over the 44 years the bureau has calculated weekly pay, capturing the large number of people out of work, those working fewer hours and those whose wages have been cut. The old record was a two-month decline during the 1981-82 recession.

"What this means," said Thomas Nardone, an assistant commissioner at the bureau, "is that the amount of money people are paid has taken a big hit; not just those who have lost their jobs, but those who are still employed."

Bryan and Tracy Lawlor, both 34, have hidden their straitened circumstances from their four young children. But as their savings dwindle, Christmas, a key indicator in the Lawlor family, will mean fewer presents this year. The Lawlors have made a practice of piling on toys and new clothes for their children at Christmas, buying relatively less the rest of the year. That will make a cutback noticeable this holiday season, and the parents are concerned that their children will begin to realize why.

"You don't want to see disappointment on their faces; that makes me feel horrible," Lawlor said. "You can be the best pilot in the airline and make the best landings, and in their eyes, I am not going to be as important as I was."

Filling the void

Lawlor is vice chairman for contract enforcement for the ExpressJet unit of the Air Line Pilots Association. He volunteered some months ago for the unpaid role, and now his fellow pilots seek his help in resolving scheduling disputes and pay issues. The calls and e-mail messages come in on his cell phone. When he is home, minding his sons, he lets the children migrate to the living room to watch a cartoon on the family's big-screen TV while he sits nearby, at the kitchen table, absorbed in mediating appeals.

That is not the same as commanding an airliner -- wearing the captain's hat -- but it brings him part way back. "My point would be that being in the captain's seat made me feel in command and capable," Lawlor said, "and that has been taken away, and through the union, I can still experience some of that, in the admiration of my peers for being able to step up and help them. Maybe psychologically that fills a void; maybe that is why I don't feel as bad as I would otherwise."