That isn't the point.
The point is punishing the people who drive your company to success is bad business ethics. It seems like what these top tier CEO's want is to do is have their cake and eat it too while their workers fight for crumbs. That's not leadership, and it's rare to find this type of behavior from leaders of businesses outside America. Japan for example, a CEO of an international airline recently docked his own pay and started taking public transportation to work just so his workers wouldn't face the brunt of the decreasing profits. That is good business ethics. Leaders who actually care about the workers that run their company and place their own profits second. You have to remember, these guys are already worth tens, hundreds of millions of dollars, some even in the billions. When they do things like this it only makes them look greedy. This is far from what the American dream initially offered. America is about freedom, equality, helping your neighbor in a time of need, what's equal about pushing all the problems onto your neighbor so you don't have to feel any of the pain from an economic crisis at all, especially when you're the one who is best prepared for it because you have already accumulated the wealth and they haven't?
I'll try to give you an analogy.. Say it's summer and I owned a lemonade stand and hired two people to work it while I supervised it. It brings in $100 a day, I pay my two workers $15 each, $40 goes to expansion, $30 goes to me. Now it's winter and I'm selling less lemonade, say I take a hit to income at 30%, now I'm making $70 total per day instead of $100. Would it be fair, right, ethical of me to dock my workers pay down to $10 each, continue to take home $30 myself, and put $30 back into the company? They're working the same hours as before, would that be OK?