Older V.P. Demoted : No Respect, but He Got $3.8 Million

Perhaps the worst day was the one when Dick Wilson walked in a corporate vice president and walked out a warehouse supervisor.

Then came the taunts about his age from his bosses at Monarch Paper Co., the sign on the wall that said, “Wilson is old,” the feeling that all these people around him were hellbent on showing him the door.

At the time, Dick Wilson was 59.

There were so many bad days back then, when younger men started taking over his duties, when he was offered a sales job at half pay. Later came the mental collapse, the deep depression diagnosed as potentially suicidal. Finally, there were the shock treatments.

Now, it feels good to have a jury ruling that growing older is not a sin.

Millions in Damages

When Dick Wilson had his day in court last December, the jurors believed him and not Monarch Paper Co. They awarded him $3.8 million, more than half of it punitive damages.

But the ordeal has extracted a price. Wilson must take lithium each day to calm himself. There were times when he thought the case would drag on forever, eating up family savings as it went. Still, it was worth it, he said, just to hear that Monarch was guilty of age discrimination.

Dick Wilson’s story is one that says much about the pitfalls an older generation of American workers faces, particularly in this era of mergers, takeovers and the trimming of work forces when companies are consolidated. Often, it is the older worker who is the first out the door.

Wilson’s is perhaps an extreme example, but in less dramatic and more subtle ways, age discrimination is happening all the time in corporate America, even though the pool of younger employees is shrinking.

Few Bother to Sue

In the last nine years, 129,035 charges of discrimination because of age were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. That figure, however, reflects only a very small percentage of those who feel they have been shoved aside.

Chris Mackaronis, a lawyer with the American Assn. of Retired Persons, said a Gallup survey commissioned by his organization found that of the people who felt they had been victimized, only 4% took any action. Many of the rest did not because such cases are difficult to prove, expensive and sometimes take years to resolve. And, Mackaronis said, age discrimination can take subtle forms--such as when a company simply decides not to teach an older worker new skills--that winning in court is far from certain.

“It’s fairly staggering,” said Mackaronis. “It’s commonplace in corporate America, but it is the exception, rather than the rule, that someone will pursue it.”

“It’s the ‘can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ mentality of corporate America that is responsible for most of these things.” he said, “and it’s a stupid policy.”

Burton Fretz, a lawyer with the National Senior Citizens Law Center, said that typically, there are two causes of age discrimination. One is the “longstanding stereotype that age equates to declining ability.” The other is company downsizing, when work force cuts are made on the basis of age.

“I don’t contend that older people shouldn’t be susceptible to layoffs, but it should be done on the basis of merit,” he said. “When you start making age-biased decisions, that’s when the trouble starts.”

Dick Wilson’s life was cruising along nicely in 1981. He was Monarch’s corporate vice president for physical distribution, as well as assistant to the company president, John Blankenship. He was making $35,000 a year and was eligible for a yearly $6,000 bonus. He had a company car, a liberal expense account and a membership at the downtown Metropolitan Racquet Club. He had been in the paper business for more than 30 years, and with Monarch since 1970.

2 Versions of Events

As Wilson sees it, he was a loyal company man, good at his job, a valuable cog in the machine who was pushed hard to quit because of his age. It was the younger ones who wanted him out, particularly Hamilton Bisbee, who assumed the company presidency from Blankenship. So they demeaned him and called him names and ultimately stripped him of everything but his salary. The most important duty he had was keeping the warehouse clean.

As management sees it, Wilson’s discrimination charges were absurd.

“They were doing more than they had to do,” A. Martin Wickliff, Monarch’s lawyer and the only person authorized to discuss the trial, said. “They didn’t think they had done anything wrong.”

In the management version of events, Wilson was a plodder, a marginal performer, a man with a vice president’s title but not much of a mind to go with it. He was promoted and protected by his friend and boss, Blankenship, who died of cancer in 1982. Wilson’s duties had to be taken over because he couldn’t handle them himself. Yes, he was offered a salesman’s job in Corpus Christi at half pay, but that was standard policy.

“He was treated like anyone else,” Wickliff said.

Ultimately, Wilson was called in on July 15, 1982, and given two choices. One was to be a warehouse supervisor. The other was to resign.

At the time of that meeting, Wilson was the oldest person on the corporate staff.

“What in God’s earth did they think his reaction would be?” Mackaronis asked. “What an incredibly demeaning suggestion!”

According to documents introduced at the trial, the actual plan was to terminate Wilson. Certainly Bisbee wanted him out. He disliked Wilson so much that he had quit talking to him. One confidential memo introduced as evidence was from Bisbee to Dick Gozon, president of Unisource, Monarch’s parent company (which is a subsidiary of the multimillion-dollar Alco Standard Corp.). In it, Bisbee wrote that “poor, non-contributing trouble making, hang-ons should be terminated with a minimum of expense and effort,” and then went on to name Wilson.

“I would try to do this as professional as possible, but certainly would request that, on the day of our termination conversation, he vacate the premises while relinquishing his office keys and credit cards,” Bisbee wrote.

Not ‘Corporate’ Type

Dick Wilson is not a man that central casting would have picked to play a corporate vice president. Certainly he wasn’t Mr. Smooth. More than a few times he had gotten himself into hot water at the office with his gruff, bluntly stated opinions. His laugh occasionally was just a little too loud.

But he was also nobody’s fool. In Wilson’s version of the story, he knew that Bisbee didn’t like him and wanted him out. He began keeping a notebook of incidents he viewed as threatening to him.

“Hell, yes, I knew what they were trying to do to me,” he said. “They were trying to make me walk.”

But Wilson wasn’t going to quit. The Houston economy was beginning its long downward spiral and his old boss, Blankenship, had admonished him never to quit Monarch because the severence benefits paid to a fired employee were so generous.

“We fire too good,” he had told Wilson.

But this being the warehouse supervisor was something of a curve ball. From corporate vice president to the loading docks? In the end, Wilson decided to take the demotion, heeding Blankenship’s advice. In August, 1982, when Wilson reported for work, he discovered that he would not be “the supervisor” of the entire warehouse, but “a supervisor” with duties that included housekeeping. In essence, Wilson saw himself as a man who had been demoted to pushing a broom.

The company version: housekeeping in a paper company warehouse is very important work, and there was never any question of what Wilson’s job would be.

“It was as clear as day,” Wickliff said.

It was not a happy Christmas in the Wilson home in 1982. The demoted Wilson began flying into rages at the least provocation. He was, as one of his lawyers, Henri-Ann Nortman, put it, “bouncing off walls.” He was also suffering from sinus attacks at work in the dusty warehouse.

Campaign of Taunts

Meanwhile, Wilson said he was being demeaned at the warehouse as well, being called “the old man “ by the people who were now his bosses. He said his immediate supervisor, Paul Bradley, went so far as to put up a cardboard sign in the warehouse that read: “Wilson is old.” Bradley later testified that the sign was meant as a joke. Wilson didn’t take it that way.

“He was completely demoralized by then,” said Nortman. “His family said they really started noting a change in personality.”

Wilson sought both physical and mental help, and on both counts doctors advised him not to return to work. One of those doctors, psychiatrist Laurence Taylor, went so far as to write Bradley a letter saying that Wilson’s “depression is of such a degree at the present time that I seriously feel there is a possibility of suicide.”

On Jan. 12, 1983, Wilson filed his first complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, beginning a series of events that would eventually bring the case before a Houston By March, 1983, wide, irrational mood swings had taken hold of him, and Wilson’s family decided that he must be committed. He was handcuffed and taken to a mental hospital. In the course of therapy over the years, he was given 10 electroshock treatments.

Later in 1983, Wilson went to see Stan Williams, a Houston lawyer, and told him what had happened over the previous two years. Williams wasn’t the first lawyer Wilson had seen, but he was the first one who believed there was a valid age discrimination case to be made against Monarch. Williams eventually enlisted Nortman’s help in trying the case. Then, last November, the battle finally came to the courtroom after years of delays.

Both sides paraded their witnesses before the jury, but Monarch could not produce written proof that Wilson was the company’s corporate dolt or that Blankenship had protected him during his years as a vice president. Wickliff acknowledged that it was one of the major weaknesses in Monarch’s case.

Youth-Oriented Policy

Meanwhile, Wilson’s lawyers introduced evidence that a major goal of the company under Bisbee was a younger look. A long-range plan, written by Bisbee in mid-1982, had the word “young” sprinkled throughout. There were phrases such as “new blood to push the oldies,” and “good young aggressive manager,” and “we need to immediately develop a young management team,” and “could be part of the young group.”

When the jurors--whose ages ranged from 24 to 52--returned after a day and a half of deliberation, they awarded Wilson his millions, and $2.2 million of the total was for punitive damages.

The foreman, Debra Stepp, said later: “We wanted to tell other companies that you can’t discriminate against employees because of age.”

Wickliff said Monarch will appeal, but would not say on what grounds.

Death Affected Case

Asked why the jury found for Wilson, Wickliff said: “That’s a good question. I still don’t know to this day.” He said his case would have been strengthened by the testimony of Blankenship, the late president of the company. Many of Monarch’s witnesses said that before his death, Blankenship had told them Wilson eventually would have to be removed from his job.

“They blamed everything on a dead man,” Williams scoffed.

As for Wilson, his victory is in proving his point.

“It was all part of the youth drive, that’s all there was to it,” he said.

Funny, though, he said: “I would have settled for a year’s salary and my company car.”