PROLOGUE
Shirley Collins sat in a nondescript office, facing Jim Laubach, editor of the Globe-Times of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Nearby sat Ronald J. Semple, an outside consultant, and Lawrence Levin, an attorney from Chicago. We're restructuring the newspaper, said the editor, reading from a prepared script; your work is unsatisfactory, he claimed. You're being terminated, he emphasized. It was a little after noon, Tuesday, April 5, 1988.
In the seven years she had been at the newspaper as feature news editor, Shirley Collins had never received a formal evaluation from any of her supervisors, although Jim Laubach later claimed he gave her "frequent verbal feedback regarding areas in which her work needed improvement."
Collins had received several awards, the most recent being second place for lifestyle sections in the annual Keystone Awards Contest at the Pennsylvania Newspaper Publishers Association. But the well-rehearsed script provided by Globe-Times management didn't allow the editor to give individual evaluations the day of her firing, although Laubach claims be was permitted to "answer appropriate questions. - - generally [dealing] with such issues as continuing health care, etc."
On the day she was fired, Shirley Collins sat there, and listened to an editor claim that her work was "unsatisfactory." Less than five months before she was fired, Shirley Collins had written a major two-part series on the effect of industrial layoffs on residents of the Bethlehem area. Now, in a ground-floor office, facing an editor, a consultant and a lawyer, Collins was about to experience what her news sources had known.
We have an agreement, the editor read, explaining that if she signed the eight-page agreement and resigned rather than allow herself to be fired, she would receive several "extra benefits," including about one week of severance pay for each year worked, continuation of health and life insurance benefits for a limited time and, if eligible, collection of ill pension benefits due.
Of course, there were a few "trade-offs" in order for Coffins to receive these compensations. For one year, she would be forbidden, without Globe-Times consent, to associate in any way with any newspaper or magazine publishing company or any radio or television station that broadcast news programs within twenty-five miles of the Globe-Times; for two years, she would not be allowed to associate with the Times Mirror Company, publisher of the competing Allentown Morning Call, or Thomson Newspapers, publisher of the nearby Easton Express. Not only couldn't she work for those organizations, she couldn't even deliver newspapers for them or rent an apartment if owned by one of the forbidden compames.
The agreement further required that Collins not apply for employment with any parent, subsidiary, affiliated, or related company of the Globe-Times; not disclose for five years what the company claimed was confidential information; and not discuss the contents of the termination agreement, except to immediate family and her attorney. She would have had to agree to "cooperate with and assist The Globe-Times in any investigations, proceedings, or actions" relating to her employment or to any matter in which I was involved or of which I had knowledge of while an employee of, or a consultant for, The Globe-Times"; and to pay all costs and expenses incurred by the company should it bring any charges against her for violation of the agreement, or should she bring any charges against the company "relative [to] any such action, proceeding, claim or charge."
And then there was paragraph 6. Whatever rights she may have had left were taken away by paragraph 6. Had she agreed, she would have signed away her rights to bring charges against the company for violations of her statutory and constitutional rights, including violation of Title VIl of the Civil Rights Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act.
Management, according to David E. McCollum, who later became the newspaper's chief operating officer; "believed that the restrictions were necessary to protect against unfair competition and to protect trade secrets and corporate confidential information."
Shirley Collins refused to sign the agreement. She was urged to consider again the many "extra benefits" she would obtain from signing and was told that Management was sorry she chose not to take advantage of those fine benefits. "You would never have known from what Management had said that they had ever met me before," says Coffins, who was soon hired by the competing Easton Express.
She never knew why she was fired from the Globe-Times. Collins was a fifty-five-year-old woman with a bachelor's degree from Wellesley, a master's degree in library science from the University of Pittsburgh, and another master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, which she had earned shortly before she was hired at the Globe-Times seven years earlier.
By the end of the day, more than two dozen employees would be fired, including more than 40 percent of the editorial staff. By the end of the year, more than fifty persons would have been fired: and about two-thirds of the editorial staff would have been fired or would have left voluntarily. Most of the staff who remained were uncertain of the direction the newspaper was taking-or whether they would even have jobs the next week All of the ten senior managers under former publisher Donald Taylor would eventually be replaced as Management shuffled personnel in an attempt to bring the newspaper out of a financial tailspin. From March 1981 to March 1988 circulation plummeted from 39,572 to 21,702. By September 1988 circulation would be 2O,758. By the end of 1989, Jim Laubach himself was gone as Management continued firing and shuffling people in its restructuring plan to save the company.
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