New and Deadly Danger in Workplace : Fear: Those with the same job as a slain human resources employee worry that layoffs could lead to more violence.

Lynne D’Agostino took the news a little more personally than some others might when she heard about the disgruntled former employee of General Dynamics who last week shot a supervisor and a human resources representative.

That’s because she, too, is a human resources director.

“It was absolutely frightening that it could happen and that we are so vulnerable,” said D’Agostino, who works for Cubic Corp.

D’Agostino took the killing of human resources specialist Michael Konz harder than most because she does the same kind of work, often mediating in disputes between workers and supervisors and sometimes relaying the bad news when employees are fired or laid off. As such, she feels vulnerable to the same kind of violent outbursts.

“You do your best to be sensitive to people who are let go, but you can still end up a victim,” D’Agostino said. “There is no adequate way to protect ourselves--physically protect ourselves. In order to do that, we’d have to isolate ourselves, and our jobs are to be accessible to employees.”

By no means is D’Agostino a voice in the wilderness. Several human resources executives acknowledged this week that share her fears because they are vulnerable to violence from current and former employees.

Meanwhile, some San Diego-area companies are taking steps to avoid a similar tragedy.

“I got home Friday night and I thought over the weekend about how it could happen to you,” said Ken Carson, human resources vice president at Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical. “I tried to think of things that we could do to minimize the possibility” of a General Dynamics-type shooting.

The suspect in the slaying of Konz, 25, is Robert Earl Mack, a former Convair Division employee who worked on the Advanced Cruise Missile assembly line. He had been fired nine days before the shootings, which occurred Friday after a grievance hearing attended by both men and by another General Dynamics employee, James English, who had been Mack’s line supervisor. English was seriously wounded in the attack.

The shootings came seven months after the killings last June of two Elgar Corp. executives by a disgruntled ex-employee. The alleged killer in that case, Larry T. Hansel, who had been let go three months before, reportedly intended to kill several other people, including Elgar’s human resources chief, Tom Erickson.

One personnel executive at a large San Diego company who asked not to be identified said there are “four or five people here who I can see doing what happened” at General Dynamics.

Some companies have already instituted changes. Carson said Teledyne Ryan will begin using security officers to escort visitors, and soon might begin checking for weapons. Another firm, General Atomics, where 40 white-collar workers were laid off last week, said it is training employees to be on the lookout for co-workers who are acting “abnormally.”

But one San Diego human resources executive who asked for anonymity said too much security would be self-defeating and even counterproductive:

“Metal detectors and security guards is going too far. There need to be certain precautions for security, but that would make it like a prison.”

El Segundo-based aerospace manufacturer Rockwell International is “re-evaluating our personnel procedures in light of what happened at General Dynamics last week,” spokeswoman Christine Castro said. Rockwell recently notified employees that it intends to lay off 1,000 workers in its Space Systems division this Spring.

General Dynamics human resource staff members were unavailable for comment Wednesday, as many were headed to Konz’s funeral in Phoenix aboard a company-chartered plane. But General Dynamics spokeswoman Julie Andrews said the company plans new but as-yet-unspecified security measures.

“It’s not clear yet what kind of security we’ll end up with, but it’s safe to say there will be more for those kinds of grievance meetings where there is some kind of conflict to be resolved,” she said.

The extra security seems warranted, D’Agostino said, since workplace shootings are no longer unbelievable phenomena in San Diego.

In addition to the General Dynamics and Elgar incidents, two Escondido postal workers were killed at the Orange Glen station in August, 1989, by fellow worker John Merlin Taylor, who also killed his wife before turning the gun on himself. Taylor was still a postal employee when the shootings occurred.

On Wednesday, an employee at a San Marcos manufacturing firm shot and killed his supervisor, although the reasons were unclear.

Although the violent acts of Mack and Hansel are aberrations, the economic pain that can help spawn such outbursts is becoming more widespread in San Diego County. The recession and defense budget cutbacks have caused unemployment to average more than 6% in 1991.

But economic conditions alone do not explain the increased incidence of violence, said psychiatrist Stephen H. Heidel, whose firm, Health and Human Resource Center, is a contract provider of psychological counseling to employees of 125 companies.

Violence in the workplace has increased in proportion to greater abuse of drugs and alcohol, which has reached epidemic proportions at home and in the workplace, he said.

“Drugs tend to decrease people’s ability to control their behavior, and people using drugs will act much more impulsively and with decreased inhibitions,” Heidel said. “When you take alcohol, there is a decreased concern for consequences, and therefore people can behave more violently. Methamphetamine and cocaine produce a variety of emotional effects, including agitation, aggressiveness and paranoia.”

Heidel said the changing, less stable corporate culture is also affecting workers.

“In the past, companies were viewed as paternalistic things that would take care of employees,” he said. “So people feel the rules have changed, that companies have violated the rules, and people who lose their jobs are very, very angry.”

The employees who feel the brunt of that anger are human resources professionals, the staff members whose job it is to tend to the process of layoffs or terminations, to help the dismissed employees in seeking out other job opportunities or to direct them to counselors who can help assuage the psychological pressures that job loss creates.

“There are a lot of people in human resources asking themselves, what’s going on and what does this mean about the future” of the profession, one executive said Wednesday. “In the past, human resources people were comfortable trying to play a fair role. Now you are a target of frustration, violence and whatever.”

“It’s crossing people’s minds whether to stay in the business,” he said.