Among the 15 million-plus unemployed workers in America, most lost jobs despite their loyalty, hard work and proficiency at what they do. Most were victims of bad decisions up the line in the heady, detached stratosphere of corporate offices where workers are mere numbers, in Wall Street investment strategies gone bad, in failed government regulatory oversight.
Decision-makers, of course, remain at work with handsome six-, seven- and eight-figure salaries, plus perks that last year, according to a USA Today and Associated Press study, averaged $170,501 per CEO. Perks amounted to more than the average laid-off worker earned over several years.
If these inequities boil the blood of jobless Americans whose only crime was to be treated like corporate cattle, there's an even more obscene example to contemplate.
Conan O'Brien.
Someone higher up in NBC—namely, NBC chief Jeff Zucker—decided to lift O'Brien out of the late-late-night cult TV wasteland and give him "The Tonight Show," television's premier late-night showcase whose earlier hosts (Steve Allen, Jack Parr and Johnny Carson) were masters of wit. Even in the hands of Jay Leno, the show continued to be a ratings front runner.
But NBC's Zucker, like so many other CEOs, made a profoundly bad decision. O'Brien's seven months as "Tonight" host was a predictable ratings disaster—about 2 million nightly viewers versus twice that many for Leno even after Leno was moved to 10 p.m. to make way for O'Brien.
Giving O'Brien "Tonight" was the equivalent of casting sissified Pee Wee Herman, instead of Burt Lancaster, as Sgt. Milt Warden in "From Here to Eternity." O'Brien's exhibitionist humor is as juvenile as college fraternity-boy panty raids and goldfish-eating contests.
However, Zucker nevertheless rewarded the dismally flopped O'Brien $32 million in personal compensation to leave the show and another $13 million for O'Brien's staff. Zucker still has his job and his own $30 million per year salary.
In exchange for $32 million, the ungrateful, spiteful O'Brien spent his last days on air trashing NBC, whining about broken promises, threatening to go elsewhere—but never owning up to his failure to meet entertainment and comedy standards of his more elegant and vastly more popular and skilled predecessors.
Like so many entertainers and pro athletes whose pay far exceeds their meager talents, O'Brien never really had an incentive to excel or to restrain his insulting behavior toward NBC. He had a contract. And a contract guaranteed he'd be a multimillionaire, even if he never delivered the goods to the people who overestimated his worth.
