On the surface, it looks like Nick Coleman is not getting his fair due. But the truth is, in other lines of work, if you leave to work for another company you will be very lucky to be welcomed back. Expecting to get your previous level of benefits/seniority is not generally considered, unless that is negotiated in at rehire. Yes 11 weeks of pay is pretty skimpy, but many of us would get none, regardless of how long we have worked for our company.

Hang in there, Nick! Fight the bastards! I'll miss the column, though.

In the real world when a major employer WOOS a former employee to come back, they don't end up sacking them five years later in a round of faux budget cutting.

No, at 3M if you leave you never get to come back, but yes, in the real world when a former employer comes a courting, you have the right to expect better treatment. Coleman came back at the Strib's insistence, not Coleman's.

More shabby treatment from the gang who reinvented the Strib in Wall Street's image.

I enjoy Nick's column and was disappointed when I learned he'd been let go. I called and cancelled my subscription to the Strib. The voice on the other end of the phone line said, "We've had a lot of complaints about Mr. Coleman," to which I replied, "So, it took you 36 years to figure out he was doing a bad job? Clearly, your management has no idea of how to run a paper. It's no wonder you're in such financial difficulties if it takes management that long to figure out when one of its employees is screwing up."
I think the both the Strib and the Pioneer Press are caving to the right wing. If complaints about columnists really mattered, Joe Soucheray would have been gone years ago from the pages of the Pioneer Press.
It's interesting that neither paper will no longer print my letters to the editor. Yet in the Friday 2/27 edition of the Pioneer Press, they carried a column by Joe Repya complaining about a cartoon that had appeared the day before. BTW, the cartoon didn't disrespect the military as Repya claimed--it was a humorous commentary about the GOP spending like a drunken sailor.
Remember Repya? He's the guy who dreamed up the lawn sign campaign when we invaded Iraq. Remember those signs? "Liberate Iraq" is what they said. Repya is welcome to his right wing views, but he needs to try and develop a sense of humor, something lacking in the far right. BTW, whatever happened to all those lawn signs?
The Pioneer Press editorial page needs to broaden its outlook a bit. Maybe the PP could hire Coleman back and thus kill several birds with one stone.
Like him or not, Nick Coleman is something of an institution in this state. He's one of the state's best columnists of the past half century. Maybe the PP could at the same time hire Katherine Kersten who was also fired by the Strib. She's way off base, but she's entitled to her opinion.

I'm a Bemidji reader. My husband and I get the paper on Sundays and always looked forward to Nick Coleman's column. When it didn't appear, we just figured he was on vacation or something. Finally yesterday I called the paper and they said he no longer works there. What? Why on earth did the Star Tribune not TELL us that Nick was going, and why? About 15, 20 years ago one of their columnists got a DUI, can't remember who it was, but they respected readers enough to tell us about it. Now they don't even bother to clue us in.