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We examine whether managers commit to reducing their pay or enact other positive worker-friendly actions after laying off employees or cutting their benefits during an economic crisis, a concept we call “sharing the pain.” Using a unique database of company actions during the recent pandemic, we study 3,097 positive and negative actions targeted at workers taken by 629 S&P 1500 firms in 2020. Our findings indicate that economic considerations such as exposure to the pandemic and poor stock performance, high within-firm pay disparity, and peer effects are the primary determinants of management’s decision to share the pain of employees. Proxied by MSCI’s human capital theme score and a signatory to the Business Roundtable Statement, stakeholder concerns are not associated with managers’ sharing of the pain. Evidence of such pain sharing from another unexpected crisis from the past–the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks–is remarkably similar. Sharing the pain is not associated with higher stock price reactions or future stock returns performance. Further analyses show that the median CEO’s wealth increased nearly 18-fold relative to the CEO pay cut for firms that enforced CEO pay cuts and laid off employees during the pandemic. The evidence suggests that sharing the pain is largely symbolic, driven by economic considerations rather than stakeholder concerns, and has no significant implications for firm value.