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At the very least, they shouldn't get a raise or bonus for pushing through their brilliant plan of cutting everyones' salaries. If there's going to be painful belt tightening, it should go all the way up.
Your responses appear to indicate that you did not 'grok' the article properly, and so your conclusions are based on fictions rather than facts. This is not a "belt tightening" exercise, rather it is a reaction to a lawsuit - if the company had not taken this action or similar, then the result would have been that they would then have been paying far over market rates for the set of employees in question, which is surely a 'go out of business strategy'.
They are not "cutting everyone's salaries", rather that is simply hyperbole. The move affects about 7,600 out of a total of about 125,000 US employees. The total compensation for some of those employees will actually increase, but perhaps not as high as the windfall that they had hoped to reap as a result of winning the lawsuit 'jackpot'. Others may see decreases in total compensation. If that makes them unhappy, this being a free country, at least for the time being, they can 'walk out the door', or they can improve their skills and find a better position inside the company.
The lesson here is to be careful of what you ask for - because you might get it. Wanna bet that some law firm made out really well, but the cannon fodder employees that they used as their entree for filing the lawsuit may end up taking unexpected cuts in their take-home pay.
Oh, and for full disclosure, I was an IBM employee for more than 20 years, and I was not one of those managers that you seem to despise. I left because I wanted to try my hand at entrepreneurism. It's a tough world out there - I've gone two years without a paycheck - but I'm planning to make up for it many times over with the 'stuff' that I've built over that time...