Would you take a pay cut to save the job of a colleague? Say 10%? Twenty per cent? Last week 2,500 employees at JCB, the digger manufacturer, did just that, sacrificing £50 a week rather than see 350 of their number heading out of the door.

Their sacrifice has been hailed as the first move of its kind in the economic crisis. But they are not the first – and they are unlikely to be the last, as I discovered after being asked the very same question live on Radio 2 by Jeremy Vine.

My answer: no way. First, because I’m a sole trader working from home. Second, it’s a gesture that would be bound to breed resentment on both sides. Every time I saw my “saved” colleague I’d remember my children without their new Boden winter coats and sigh. And what would the colleague feel – ever so humble or simply humiliated?

On a practical level, too, the band of brothers thing is out of date: these days so many working practices are flexible and portfolio-based and it’s commonplace to have two or three different jobs at the same time. Even those who have a job for life – GPs, say – can opt for a career where six months here, five months there, are regarded as perfectly acceptable.

My frankness was greeted by the sound of sucked teeth. Jonathan Bartley from Ekklesia, the religious think tank, clearly disapproved of my naked selfishness. He suggested we should all work on a cooperative basis, where the aim of business is not to profit shareholders but to allow employees a greater control of the organisation. Pull together and take the cuts was his line. “I was involved in a dotcom business in 2001,” Bartley told me later. “We were all going to be made redundant. I suggested we took pay cuts but that wasn’t taken up. In the end we all lost our jobs.”

He shrugged: “It costs a lot to make someone redundant.”

Our dispute clearly resonated: one phone-in caller told us his boss insisted they all took a pay cut to save their jobs. That was seven years ago. The cuts have never been restored. The next caller was a woman from a Norwich travel agency. After 9/11, when the travel industry collapsed, they were all asked to take pay cuts or go under. The entire office agreed. The business was saved. Six months later their salaries went back to normal and everyone was given a loyalty bonus. A heart-warming parable – but just how many of us would do the same now?

“This question is totally on our agenda at the moment. All four of us company directors have just taken 15% pay cuts,” says the architect George Ferguson, former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects and chairman of Acanthus Ferguson Mann, the Bristol-based archiecture practice. “And we did it in the previous recession, back in the early 1990s. Then we got the whole practice to take 15% cuts for a short while. We also made some redundancies. You can’t keep everybody when the market falls off a cliff and we aren’t a charity.” This time round did anyone resent taking the cuts? “Nobody loved it, but we are having to adjust downwards.”

What about the money men? Jus-tin Urquhart Stewart is in charge of 70 people at Seven Investment Management in London: he doesn’t rule anything out: “People who can afford salary cuts are the senior executives, so it’s those people I would ask rather than junior staff. I’d far rather reduce costs than lose jobs.”

According to Stewart, such a question would not have arisen in the last recession: “It’s one of the key economic changes in the country. Twenty years ago most of us worked for leviathans. When you hit a recession, you lost your job. Now most of us work for smaller companies.”

JCB isn’t a small company, mind, but Stewart has a point. In areas such as television production, small independents are rapidly replacing behemoths, while the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) says the majority of people in the private sector are employed by a small or medium-size business (defined as employing fewer than 250 people). There are now 4.7m such businesses in the country, a rise of about 25% in the past decade.

As Stewart says: “Working for smaller companies makes us much more agile and adjustable to short-term problems. One of those adjustments might be having a temporary pay cut. I tell you what, it quickly defines people’s loyalties.”

So isn’t there anyone out there, like me, who feels distinctly unaltruistic and is unafraid to admit it? David Salvi, director of Hurford Salvi Carr in central London, is one (you can always depend on an estate agent to be brutal). He wouldn’t take a 10% cut for a colleague: “But if I was required to take a 20% pay cut to save my own job, the answer would be yes. Why would I not accept a 10% pay cut to save someone else’s job? Because if I give 100% to my job during my working week, then I feel I should be rewarded accordingly. I don’t think an employer has the right to ask me to take a pay cut to keep the team in place. You get out what you put in.”

But if it was to save your own skin? “I’d be looking selfishly at my opportunities to get another job in the current market and that would be very difficult at the moment, so I’d be happy to take a pay cut.”

“Everyone is looking at everyone else and deciding whether they would be willing to work for a bit less or not at all,” says Stephen Alambritis of the FSB. “The boss may encourage a four-day week, or ask for voluntary redundancies, or go for pay cuts. But employment law is strong so you can’t have wage deduction without employee consent.”

The federation suggests that companies should progress with “frank and honest discussions” in the coming months. “Less money or staff cuts,” says Alambritis. “We think it will come to that.”

Frankly, then, and honestly: where do you stand?

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