Murder in the Office : At Best, Life in an Unemployment Office Is Frustrating. Workers in Garden Grove Said Their Boss Made It Intolerable. No One Listened Until It Was Too Late.

Several months after an employee threatened to kill him--and more than three years before another actually did--Louis Zuniga, manager of the state Employment Development Department (EDD) office in East Los Angeles, was transferred to his last assignment, in Garden Grove. Zuniga, who carried with him the reputation of a man disliked and feared, wasted no time in living up to his image.

Soon after arriving, he gathered the employees in the Garden Grove office and told them that he had been sent “to clean up the place.” He told them that within the department he was known as “The Assassin.” One worker recalled: “That was the first meeting with us. That set the tone.”

Things got worse. To boost productivity in an office that he said was lagging behind others in the state, Zuniga demanded that caseload quotas be raised. To erase a backlog, he canceled Christmas vacations.

Others had their own stories: Displeased with a clerk who was a union shop steward, Zuniga reassigned her to dust shelves. To discourage tardiness, he would often stand at the door, red pen in hand, marking down everyone who was even a few seconds late. Fearful of the confrontation, latecomers often just turned around in the parking lot, went home and called in sick.

But in Sacramento, where the EDD is governed, Zuniga had a good reputation. “His production at our offices was one of the best,” says Kay Kiddoo, EDD’s director. Some of his Garden Grove workers also were impressed. One described Zuniga as “brilliant.” Says Robert McLaren, a Cal State Fullerton professor of child development who first met Zuniga at a 1969 Orange County poverty seminar: “I was so impressed with his zeal for wanting to help people. One phrase he used over and over again was, ‘Job security is one of the most important facts of life. If a person is insecure about his job and in his work, it may make him insecure in everything else in life.’ One thing he said was, ‘I see my job in life to make people feel good about themselves.’ ”

Yet tensions gradually rose over the course of Zuniga’s 3 1/2-year tenure in Garden Grove. Employees complained of inhumane treatment. Grievances were filed. Paramedics were even called to treat workers who had collapsed on the job--one week they were called three times. Four of the six employees treated by paramedics under Zuniga’s tenure had no identifiable health problems and said they had buckled under stress. Their symptoms included faintness, chest pains and muscle strains.

Then came Monday, March 31, the day after Easter.

Just after 7 that morning, as employees were coming to work, Zuniga summoned Fidel Gonzalez Jr., a longtime EDD job agent, to his glass-enclosed office at the back of the building.

A few quiet words were exchanged. Then, without warning, Gonzalez, 53, pulled a new .38-caliber revolver from his pocket and shot the 50-year-old Zuniga three times. Quickly, Gonzalez turned the gun to his own temple and fired once.

Within seconds, the two men, whose lives had intertwined for nearly 20 years, lay dead in Zuniga’s blood-splashed office, sprawled six feet apart .

Inside the Garden Grove bureau, there was shock, revulsion--and relief. According to one employee, a group of Garden Grove workers called their counterparts in East Los Angeles and said, “Come join us for a drink. Zuniga’s dead.”

And yet, Zuniga’s funeral service at a cavernous La Habra church was standing room only, filled with friends, relatives and colleagues.

fter the killings, flowers were placed on the desks of the two men. And staffers felt free to talk. What emerged was a grim portrait of brutal working conditions, the indifference of a state bureaucra cy and union bungling that goes far beyond the strife of Zuniga’s tenure in Orange County.

Working for the Employment Development Department is never easy. All over California, streams of people short on money and opportunity pour daily into EDD offices to look for work, apply for benefits, appeal the denial of aid or prove that they are still out of work.

But the Garden Grove shootings underscored wider problems in an agency whose staff of 10,000 is chronically under stress. The state Legislature recently adopted a proposal to computerize EDD, although legislative analysts said it was inadequately researched. With automation came job insecurity and staff cutbacks. State budget tightening has added pressure on all EDD workers and managers.

“It’s a no-win job,” says Cecily Law, one of several employees in the Garden Grove office who determines which applicants will get unemployment pay and which won’t. “Somebody always hates you.”

Sometimes the hatred turns violent:

At a downtown San Francisco EDD office on June 6, a man apparently upset because he was denied unemployment benefits came back with a semiautomatic rifle and a hatchet. He pointed the rifle at a female EDD worker and pulled the trigger several times, but the weapon, although loaded, misfired. Her supervisor then charged the man and pulled the gun away, but not before getting smashed in the head several times with the hatchet. The assailant, a 43-year-old man, was eventually subdued and jailed on two counts of attempted murder. Officials said a state policeman who helped out was on hand “due to the fact that people do get upset when they’re denied benefits.”

At the Garden Grove office, at midnight on June 21, 1982, an out-of-work carpenter rammed his car through the glass front doors. The man was distraught because he thought he had been denied unemployment benefits. The EDD maintained that no decision on the man’s eligibility for aid had been made.

After what union officials said was an unprovoked attack on a 68-year-old caseworker at an EDD office in Los Angeles in May, 1981, more than 30 EDD workers staged a protest about cutbacks in security. Employees said at the time that workers at EDD offices statewide were facing increasingly hostile and irate customers.

The EDD’s position today, says Valerie Reynoso, the agency’s spokeswoman, is that the Garden Grove killings represent an isolated incident and were unrelated to management practices.

HINTS OF TROUBLE SURFACED early in Zuniga’s career as an EDD manager. In 1982, he was assigned to manage the East Los Angeles unemployment office, because “he had proven himself as a good supervisor dealing with subordinates and peers,” says John Calderas, EDD regional administrator at that time.

He had an impressive resume: He’d been an aerospace engineer, a two-term La Habra city councilman and a federal government counselor for servicemen and refugees. But he could be tough to work for, too.

“The man had a (hit) list of people. He was irrational. He was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” says Art Hassan, former union steward at the East Los Angeles office.

During his 10 months there, at least 10 grievances and formal complaints about Zuniga and his policies were filed by East Los Angeles employees with the California State Employees Assn. (CSEA). The complaints, far more than for most supervisors, alleged that Zuniga denied sick leave, badgered workers and penalized those who consulted the union about problems. “We had a situation there where there was dissension every day,” Hassan recalls. “I went to work in the morning to protect my job rather than to perform a public service.”

Calderas concedes that workers under Zuniga had “some adverse reactions,” but he attributes them to Zuniga’s insistence that employees “meet standards set by the department.”

The resentment of Zuniga soon erupted into threats. A vulgar caricature of Zuniga, a knife plunged into him, was found attached to a wall of the men’s lavatory. Then, after Zuniga fired an employee for allegedly falsifying documents, the employee returned to the office with a loaded revolver.

“He had told me time and time again that he wanted to put (Zuniga) away,” Hassan says. “I took him to a church nearby to talk with a priest friend of mine, and we took him home.

“I told the district (administrator). I told Lou Zuniga. I begged him. I said, ‘Lou Zuniga, you have too many enemies.’ When I talked to Al Dave (then district administrator), I asked him, ‘What are you waiting for, a tragedy?’ ” (Al Dave declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Shortly after the incident--and less than a year after taking over the East Los Angeles office--Zuniga was transferred to Garden Grove.

EDD administrators said Zuniga was moved to the Orange County post to reduce his commute from his La Habra home. But Zuniga’s wife said he was sent to Garden Grove because “he was a trouble-shooter. He would jump from one place to the next to put into action what they needed.”

What the Garden Grove office needed, Zuniga told his new employees during their first meeting, was to improve its record for sending the unemployed their first benefit checks. In that aspect, the Garden Grove office was the slowest in the state, he said.

“We were having trouble meeting our deadlines,” says Cindy Coutu, a former employee in Garden Grove. “The first thing he did was cancel everyone’s Christmas vacation. He alienated everyone.”

Zuniga immediately set about to boost productivity in the office, but he chose “absolutely, positively the wrong way to do it,” Coutu says. “You have to motivate, not frighten, people.”

Although his co-workers characterized Zuniga as a troubleshooter who lived to increase office production, EDD officials would not describe him as such and refused to provide the statistics to show whether he had made his office more effective.

Spokeswoman Reynoso would provide only two months of production figures from Zuniga’s tenure in Garden Grove. “The conclusion is this office wasn’t the best, it wasn’t the worst,” she said. “It was average to the other field offices.”

According to the union, the EDD calculated that each benefits worker in the Garden Grove office was averaging 10.9 completed cases per day. Regional EDD administrator Patricia Thornton said the budget demanded a minimum of 12 per day, and Zuniga told his employees in August, 1985, that he wanted 17. “ ‘I just want to see if you can do it,’ ” one employee quoted him as saying.

In 1984, determinations workers in Garden Grove filed a group grievance because of Zuniga’s policy for that section, the most stressful in the office. Workers there must decide and tell clients whether they will receive unemployment benefits. Zuniga forbade those employees to take breaks while clients were waiting at the counter. The policy amounted to forbidding breaks entirely, because “there is always someone at the counter,” says Garden Grove’s Cecily Law.

Through unofficial negotiations, the union persuaded Zuniga to compromise on this harsh edict, but only a handful of such problems were resolved in the Garden Grove office.

Zuniga did make sporadic gestures to improve office morale, but they often seemed to backfire.

When a 12-hour workday was ordered for installation of the computer system, Zuniga arranged for breakfast to be cooked at the office for his workers. The smell of cooking food, however, nauseated one pregnant employee, “and that ruined the whole day for (Zuniga),” a worker says.

Still, as his wife, Nancy, points out, Zuniga must have had some friends. “I think the fact that there were close to 1,500 people at each service (funeral and rosary) shows somebody cared about him,” she says. “They weren’t all relatives.”

Says Mike Clements, the first director of a La Habra drug-abuse clinic that Zuniga championed: “I find the discussion of his management style distasteful. What is essential is the life he led here in La Habra and in Orange County. The real issue is the contribution he made to his community.”

Zuniga worked 13-hour days but still found time to spend weekends with his multiply handicapped teen-age daughter , Elizabeth, and weeknights in community service activities--so many that, according to his wife, “after 24 years . . . you lose track.”

“He loved to take Elizabeth to the ballgames,” Nancy Zuniga says. “They had season tickets. Now I’ll have to do that. . . . He was probably the best father in the world. He did everything for his children.”

One of 11 children born to farm-worker parents, Zuniga was active in the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Hispanic Coalition. He attended Garden Grove Chamber of Commerce meetings regularly.

“I got along with him well,” says Ann Beeson, a Garden Grove EDD employee who was on disability during the shooting. “He would probably have been a very nice man, socially.”

Yet even his wife, while approving of his style, recognizes how it could have backfired on occasion. “Louie had a philosophy all the time he worked for the state. Those people received a good paycheck, and he demanded at least eight hours of work. I’m sure he drove those people crazy,” she says. “But he never hurt them. Louie said it the way he saw it. I used to say to him, ‘Try being diplomatic.’ ”

Diplomacy came hard for him, however. She says her husband felt “a lot of racial pressure” to succeed as a Latino amid racial bias on the one hand and demands for productivity on the other.

“He felt the same amount of stress as his employees,” Nancy Zuniga says. “A lot of times, he hurt. A lot of times he thought he did the right thing, and his upper management didn’t totally back him. No matter what his management style was, no matter what the internal strifes were, this never should have happened.”

Zuniga never talked of Gonzalez as if he were a problem employee, Zuniga’s wife says. In fact, her husband “rather liked” Gonzalez.

Zuniga and Fidel Gonzalez joined EDD 17 years ago. Both were active in Latino politics, both had run unsuccessfully for state office--Gonzalez for lieutenant governor, Zuniga for Assembly. And both, people close to them said later, wanted out of the Garden Grove office.

For 17 years, Gonzalez had been a job agent, charged with finding employment for the difficult to hire, such as convicted felons and the disabled. The position allowed him flexible hours and the gratification of working with the unemployed on a personal level. He earned a reputation for finding jobs for those already written off by the system as impossible cases. He had the freedom--and the dedication--to go to a client’s home, drag him out of bed and make sure he made it to a new job.

It wasn’t a particularly stressful assignment, most people in the office thought.

But during the last months of his life, Gonzalez apparently was a man tormented, interviews with friends and associates indicate (his widow declined to be interviewed). After spending several weeks last winter visiting his ailing father in Texas, Gonzalez returned but fell behind in his work. To compensate, he told friends, he took files home, which was a violation of office policy.

A signed note found in Gonzalez’s pocket on the day of the shootings hinted at confusion. The note said that he was responsible for the destruction of certain case files, but officials say no case files were missing or destroyed. He’d told friends he feared being behind in his caseload, but EDD officials say he wasn’t.

“I hope,” read the note, that “this will alleviate a lot of stress from my co-workers and set them free.”

Although neither the EDD nor the union has a record of Gonzalez’s filing grievances or seeking a transfer, Gonzalez, the father of three children, apparently was looking for a way to escape.

“I think his problems were long-existing,” says Ed Duncan, once Gonzalez’s supervisor in Garden Grove and a pallbearer at his funeral. “They certainly predate his coming to this office. He didn’t confide his problems or desires. Maybe he felt that because I’m Anglo, I wouldn’t understand.”

In fact, as early as last December, Gonzalez had approached an EDD affirmative action officer and longtime acquaintance, asking him “to keep an eye out” for jobs that Gonzalez might want.

In January, for reasons no one seems to know, Gonzalez went to a Westminster gun store and bought the weapon that he later used in the killings: a .38-caliber, Brazilian-made revolver.

In early March, Gonzalez telephoned an old friend, Chet Wray, and asked him to use his influence to arrange a transfer. Wray, a former assemblyman from Garden Grove, is now a member of the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board. Wray says he telephoned Mark Sanders, EDD deputy director of operations, and told him “there was some need of urgency to get Fidel out of the office.” Wray says Sanders promised to work on it.

By the end of the month, Gonzalez was growing more desperate. On Tuesday, March 25, six days before the shooting, Gonzalez became ill after the office lunchroom was sprayed for cockroaches. On Wednesday he called in sick and again beseeched Wray for help.

Gonzalez took off Thursday and Friday as vacation days. On that Friday, he telephoned Wray again, more frantic than ever. “It’s urgent that I make the transfer for more reasons than one,” Wray remembers Gonzalez saying. “I don’t want to go in and, you know, have a confrontation Monday. I just can’t go in Monday. Get me out of there!”

Gonzalez was unaware of just how close he may have been to a possible transfer. That afternoon, Thornton, the EDD regional director, telephoned the Garden Grove office to speak to either Zuniga or Gonzalez about the transfer request. Neither man was there.

There was no chance for Thornton to call back Monday. By 7:11 a.m., both men were dead.

fter a while, workers in Garden Grove started calling the office the “concentration camp.” Yet they said after the shootings that there seemed to have been no response to their complaints and grievances. Many of the Garden Grove employees said they placed equal blame on the union for failing to communicate and solve their problems.

One former employee in the troubled office says: “I think the problem was everyone was looking at this as somebody else’s problem. CSEA was saying, ‘You have to document everything before we can act.’ The regional office was saying, ‘You have to deal with CSEA.’ ”

The problems were legion: The building’s ceiling leaked, the air conditioning was inadequate and the office was infested with cockroaches and mice. Eventually, the entire work force of 75 filed a grievance about the condition of the their building. Moving the office was a priority for Zuniga himself, although his plans were constantly being frustrated by bureaucratic red tape.

A new computer system installed last December almost immediately proved itself unreliable and troublesome, slowing work and sometimes stopping it altogether, employees say. A 1984-85 budget proposal for automating EDD offices was considered inadequate by the state legislative analyst but was enacted anyway.

The new computer also contributed to the workers’ anxieties and became the symbol of the department’s efforts to improve efficiency and eliminate jobs, according to workers and union officials.

EDD spokeswoman Reynoso counters that the department’s “operations have been streamlined. Our automation efforts have increased our efficiency.” She says the introduction of computers hasn’t affected staffing levels.

In the last few years, as the economy has improved and some EDD functions have been taken over by other branches of state government, the EDD has had less to do. This has permitted it to operate with fewer people. While state funding for the department has increased 27% in the past six years, officials say that the agency’s “personnel years,” the state’s term for one person working full time for one year, have decreased 30% over the same period.

“The workload has decreased,” Reynoso says, but “automation has not led to layoffs. All of our cutbacks have been due to attrition.”

Union representatives say that they knew of the problems in Garden Grove but that many could not be settled through formal channels. “Only contractual violations are grievable,” says Jodee Smith, a union representative. In other words, the union is geared to handle disputes over physical working conditions and the length of coffee breaks, for example, but less definable problems such as harassment must be rectified through more cumbersome processes.

If EDD administrators had tried to investigate the grievances, it would have been difficult, union officials acknowledge. The union’s files have only been computerized since 1982, and the documents are scattered all over Southern California with former union representatives who keep their own files.

One factor that intensified the problems in Garden Grove was that union representatives rarely stayed in one territory for more than six months before being transferred. As a result, no union workers were there long enough to see the troubles mount. And even if they were, they rarely had time in their short stays to document and settle the problems.

Consequently, EDD officials contend, not enough grievances were filed to present a compelling case.

Still, Smith says, “It’s impossible for the department to not have been aware of what was going on with Zuniga.”

Questioned after the killings, Kiddoo, the EDD’s top administrator, told a reporter that “we have no grievances on Lou. And I’ve checked with the local offices, and we have nothing formal.”

A correction came a few days later from Reynoso. She said 13 grievances had been filed by Zuniga’s employees, “but only two or three” were against the manager himself, and none of them cited poor working conditions. “The reason we did not find these was because they were in our personnel section,” she said. “They were not serious enough to be forwarded to the deputy of operations.”

Stewart Lerner, an EDD district administrator who oversees Garden Grove and four other offices, and his boss, regional administrator Thornton, refused to be interviewed.

Documents show that at least some word of the troubles in Garden Grove reached top-level Sacramento administrators. In a Sept. 12, 1985, letter to Kiddoo, a female employee asked for relief from “humiliating working conditions.”

The woman, who still works in the office and who asked that her name not be used, received a reply from Mark Sanders, one of Kiddoo’s deputies: “This is in response to your letter in which you alleged that Mr. Lou Zuniga was harassing you. . . . Please work with management to meet standards. I am confident that your manager will be supportive and empathetic to your efforts.”

And last year, when David B. Swoap, the chief administrator of the state Health and Welfare Agency, sent questionnaires to all its employees, EDD workers included, seeking suggestions for improvements, at least 11 Garden Grove office employees responded.

One wrote that Zuniga “cannot deal with subordinates in a humane manner,” and another asked that EDD “transfer Mr. Zuniga to a position where he does not supervise people.”

There was no response. Swoap, who has since resigned, says other staffers processed the thousands of returned suggestions, though he did see some himself. He says he did not recall Garden Grove’s complaints and noted that the intent of the survey was to identify “programmatic and policy changes that could help overall.”

Bradley Booth, an attorney with the CSEA’s arbitrations unit, believes that as a “centrally controlled” bureaucracy, the EDD allows lower-ranking administrators “very little flexibility” and discourages negative information from rising to the top. Consequently, Booth says, “EDD probably has the poorest labor relations of any agency in the state.”

A FEW DAYS AFTER THE SHOOTINGS, John Hamilton, a union official, wrote to James Wheatley, EDD chief of employee relations, about stress.

“In light of the recent tragedies,” he said in the April 2 letter, “I am strongly urging you to have the department implement a stress-management program for all EDD employees immediately.”

Hamilton’s letter went on to say that “while the recent incidents may not be completely attributable to work-related stress, many employees have complained to CSEA of increasingly stressful conditions in EDD which can be tied directly to work.”

Since the shooting, employees who either witnessed the tragedy or worked with both men have been offered counseling. “I think it’s funny that they ignored this, and now they’re giving us therapy,” says employee Cecily Law. “If they (administrators) had done something about it, we wouldn’t need therapy.”

The subject came up again at a May 5 meeting requested by the union. EDD Director Kiddoo, two state personnel directors and several EDD employees attended. Union officials outlined the factors contributing to what they said was a stressful situation inside the EDD, and they proposed establishing a joint labor-management committee to study solutions.

Kiddoo rejected the idea on the grounds that employees have access to stress-management courses provided by their health insurance carriers, says Peter H. McClory, the union’s chief negotiator for 20,000 state employees, half of them EDD workers.

McClory wrote a follow-up letter May 13, urging Kiddoo to reconsider, but since then “we have received no response,” he says. “Not even lip service.”

“Our impression was that the department . . . dismissed stress as either not a priority or not real,” McClory wrote.

At a state budget hearing May 13, Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), chairwoman of the Assembly Ways and Means subcommittee on state administration, urged the EDD and the union to work together to reduce employee stress.

Michael Corbett, lead consultant to the subcommittee, cited union concern that “rapid automation” in the EDD, combined with staff cutbacks, were “placing a greater workload and strain on the remaining employees.”

Kiddoo and EDD spokeswoman Reynoso would not talk to The Times about employee stress.

In the May 13 letter, McClory said to Kiddoo: “You indicated that everyone is susceptible to it (stress) ‘if you let it get to you,’ and that sometimes ‘we bring it upon ourselves.’ ”

Four months have passed since Zuniga and Gonzalez lay dead at 9738 Garden Grove Blvd. The furnishings have been rearranged, the dead men’s desks are gone, but the scars have yet to fade.

“I was talking to someone in another office, and we were just relieved, a lot of us, that it was obvious who did it,” one man still working at the Garden Grove office said recently of the shooting. “I would have done it differently, of course. I would have ambushed him. . . . But any one of us could have been a suspect.”