A lot of these morale problems happen after layoffs as well. If the layoffs are deep enough it makes sense to move the entire company to a different city and completely reboot. In those situations I've seen as much as 90% of the company churn in the course of the year. Once the dust settles it's basically a new company and can feel like a high growth startup.
Would be interesting to take a vote from the employees. Would they rather take a collective paycut or have x% chance of getting laid off?
And the best employees, who can find a new job even during recession, will leave.
There's more to a job than pay rate. If the best employees leave because of a recession-time temporary pay cut, maybe the company culture was rotten and the company deserves to go down!