Conan Gets Paid

Looks like Conan will get paid
Okay, I know what with the earthquake in Haiti, and any number of pressing humanitarian tragedies going on right now, a white guy getting paid 40 million dollars to quit his job is well, kinda insignificant. But I think Conan is funny. And I also think he's getting shafted by his employer, the only difference between him and me in this regard is he has a contract that ensures his employer will pay handsomely for the privilege of screwing him, whereas I, in the "right to work" (snort) state of PA, lacking representation by a proper union or Civil Servant designation, can be fired for either a) no good reason, or b) no reason at all.
Without any cause, whatsoever. In fact, a previous employer of mine went so far as to _make_stuff_up to cover their own incompetent identity-thieving screw-ups and attempted to fire me in the process. I kept my job, but lost some dignity. And some money. I kept working there, mostly because I liked the folks I worked with, and I enjoyed the job, but a small part of me stayed long enough to vest my pension, so the company some day would have to pay me back for what they tried to do.
Unions get vilified in the press a lot these days (who do a lot of pundits blame for the failure of GM and Chrysler) and no doubt they are not without blame, but stupid CEOs and upper management (hellooooo, NBC? Anyone Home?) are just as much if not more so to blame. No one vilified the cost of paying U.A.W. salaries when the U.S. Automakers were making large profits on SUVs, but when short-sighted management got caught with there pants on the groundand no small, high-quality fuel-efficient cars when gas went to $4.00 a gallon, suddenly the evil Unions were to blame.
As if the Union were responsible for the allocation of R&D dollars, Engineering resources, and "next-quarter" instead of "next 10 or 20 years" planning for the future allocations done by the boardroom.
Right, blame the folks tasked with assembling and selling a shitty product, not the folks in charge of it being a piece of shit to begin with.