IBM Corp has suffered the excruciating embarrassment of facing its first defeat in an employee discrimination suit after a US District Court jury in Trenton, New Jersey awarded former $70,000-a-year systems engineer Richard Rathemacher $315,000 in back pay plus his costs after he claimed that he was constructively dismissed because of age – he was 55 and had spent his whole career selling small computers to first time customers when in 1984 a new manager was put in charge of the Edison, New Jersey branch and denied him promotion because he wanted to bring in new blood: he was moved to management of the branch’s most complex systems with no training and then told he was not hacking it, and he lost his post as a manager and after several transfers was moved to an abandoned 10,000 square foot branch office in Tinton Falls, one half of which was used as a store; he came in each day with nothing to do, was told that the absolute deadline for the company’s retirement offer was July 31 1987, he decided a day earlier he did not intend to accept, but came in to find not a stick of furniture in his office, and according to Associated Press, one week later he threw in the towel.
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