Morale Building : New Unemployment Office Helps Put Bitter Memories Behind

Cockroaches roamed the Garden Grove unemployment office, where the walls were windowless, the ceiling low and the bathroom covered with graffiti. Inside the manager’s office, a picture covered a bullet hole.

This was the “concentration camp,” a place of high stress and low morale where state employees faced a daily stream of down-on-their luck clients, many hostile and some even violent. This was the place where workers watched as their boss was shot to death by a colleague, who then turned the gun on himself.

But on Thursday, the 30 employees of the state Employment Development Department moved from that Garden Grove Boulevard building to new surroundings a few miles away. The new office is twice as large and designed especially for the needs of those who work with the jobless.

“I think everyone took a look and saw how the not-so-great physical conditions maybe contributed to what happened here,” said one woman who has worked for the EDD branch since long before the murder-suicide.

“It’s a brand new building, and the morale is somewhat uplifted by that,” she said.

Painted in antique white with soothing mauve accents, the new unemployment office, situated in a 21,000-square-foot building at 12661 Hoover St., was buzzing with excited employees Thursday after the orange moving vans arrived with furniture, file cabinets and the like.

“This is just heavenly!” declared Geri Shields, an EDD job agent, as she stood in the new building’s sun-drenched lunchroom. “The morale is very different already.”

“It’s a lot less stressful than it used to be,” added Cecily Law, a longtime worker at the Garden Grove branch office. “No more rotary-dial phones.”

The new office, brightened by windows and skylights, has been more than two years in the making. It is also the latest and perhaps most profound step taken by EDD officials in Sacramento toward improving the work environment of the state employees who union officials say have the highest stress levels of any California government agency.

And no less significant, the move finally provides an escape for daily memories of the deaths several of them witnessed.

Branch manager Richard Johnson, who hung a picture over one of the bullet holes when he inherited the office, said the shootings alone did not prompt the move. But Johnson, who is credited by his workers for getting them into a new, safer workplace, said the attention that followed the shootings may have helped.

“It was tough working there,” one worker said of the old spot. “A lot of us just couldn’t wait to get out.”

On the morning of March 31, 1986, Fidel Gonzalez Jr. walked into his boss’s office in the troubled branch and fired three shots into the chest of Louis H. Zuniga Jr. and one into his own temple.

A dozen workers watched the men die in a double tragedy that became an emblem of an agency in distress. Although Gonzalez and Zuniga died, they did not take the EDD’s troubles with them.

Union officials, relatives and the men’s co-workers blamed their deaths on stressful working conditions and an indifferent state bureaucracy. The intolerable job environment was worsened, most employees said at the time, by Zuniga, who described himself to his staff as “The Assassin.” Publicity from the shootings merely focused attention on working conditions at the EDD field offices that employees said were typified by those that for years persisted at the run-down Garden Grove branch.

EDD officials in Sacramento maintained that the murder-suicide was a tragic but isolated incident that had nothing to do with working conditions at its branch offices statewide.

But at the Garden Grove location there were other violent incidents. For instance, at midnight on June 21, 1982, an out-of-work carpenter who believed he had been denied unemployment checks drove his car through the glass front doors.

In the year after the shootings, 52 EDD offices throughout California were identified as high-risk branches in need of security improvements. And a task force of state employees recommended equipping high-risk offices with a variety of safety measures.

For example, a push-button alarm system, like those used in banks, has been put into the new Garden Grove building.

Other features include tinted-glass counter windows that provide a subtle deterrent for clients who choose to spit or toss things at workers. There are also panic bars like those at theater exits that allow them to be opened only from the inside.

Workers at the new building say the homeless people who frequented the old office will probably follow, including “Boulevard Bill,” a 51-year-old transient who sleeps behind the buildings and beneath the bushes that border the former EDD branch. Bill has adopted branch manager Johnson as the one who will be entrusted with receiving his Social Security checks and job queries.

On Thursday, Boulevard Bill dropped by the old office to say goodby, but somehow no one really believed he meant it. They figured he would find his way to the new facility.

One man named Bob (“He comes in yelling at us that it’s our fault he doesn’t have any money,” one employee said) had already found the new office. After Johnson twice ordered Bob’s beat-up school bus towed from the old office lot, Bob picked it up from the impound lot and had it delivered to the new Garden Grove EDD office parking lot--before the stripes were painted.

“I asked him to move it,” Johnson said, “and he told me, ‘I have a right to be here. I’m a client of yours.’ ”