The Woman Who Must Trim BofA’s Work Force : Banking: Kathleen Burke faces the unpleasant chore of paring 12,000 positions after the merger with Security Pacific.

With BankAmerica Corp. and Security Pacific Corp. on the verge of merging to become the nation’s second-largest bank, Kathleen J. Burke has arguably one of the toughest assignments in banking.

As director of human resources for the combined bank, Burke will oversee the melding of a 91,000-person work force into a single institution. That includes the unpleasant task of eliminating as many as 12,000 positions over the next three years.

At 40, she also will be the only woman on the “new” B of A management committee, reporting directly to Richard M. Rosenberg, chairman and chief executive, and Robert H. Smith, Security Pacific’s CEO, who will be president and chief operating officer of the merged bank.

Burke, a 14-year veteran of Security Pacific in Los Angeles, acknowledges the immensity of the task ahead. She says her key role will be “to keep the dialogue going” with employees, helping to curb their uncertainty--particularly for those at Security Pacific.

“What we’re trying to do is make sure that managers are communicating often . . . so there isn’t the pent-up concern that they know something and aren’t telling,” Burke said in an interview last week in her 40th-floor, bay-view office at B of A’s San Francisco’s headquarters.

Since August, when the merger was proposed, Burke has spent a great deal of time being a “good listener” and answering questions from anxious friends and colleagues at Security Pacific. “I’ve talked to people about their personal goals,” she said. “In general, my advice has been that people should prepare for the contingencies.”

Recognizing that fired employees would have a tough time given the unprecedented consolidation underway in banking, Burke and other executives devised a broad severance package. In addition to relatively generous severance pay, the plan provides for retraining grants, business loans and subsidies for nonprofit work.

As decisions are made about layoffs, Burke said, managers will sit down individually with employees to walk them through details of the program. She said job decisions will be made on a unit-by-unit basis, with attrition accounting for some of the downsizing.

She hastened to add: “Most people will have a job.”

Burke, a Seattle native, was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Washington State University in 1973, with a BA in political science. While in college, she spent a year in Chile and later worked as an intern on Capitol Hill for the resident commissioner of Puerto Rico, indulging a fascination for Latin America and the Spanish language that dates from grade school.

After earning a law degree from Georgetown University, Burke joined Security Pacific’s legal department in 1978. She was appointed senior vice president and corporate secretary in 1988 and head of human resources in 1989. Two years later, she was named director of administrative services, with responsibility for human resources, public affairs, community and employee affairs and the economics department.

When the merger is completed later this month, she will assume the titles of executive vice president and director of corporate human resources at B of A.

As one of the highest-ranking women in banking, Burke “enjoys a solid reputation” in the industry, said Stuart Sadick, managing director of Chartwell Partners, an executive search firm based in San Francisco. “She is recognized as an individual with a broad and good understanding of the business.”

Maurice K. DeWolff, executive vice president and general counsel at Security Pacific and Burke’s first boss, describes her as straightforward, candid and “an excellent counselor.”

“She will work endlessly to get the right result,” said DeWolff, who will be deputy general counsel at the merged bank.

Although Burke will continue to travel often between Southern and Northern California, she hopes to move later this month to a leased hillside home in San Francisco with her husband, Ralph Davis, a general contractor.

Burke’s frequent-flier schedule has included one or two trips a week to San Francisco, Seattle and other markets where the banks operate. The hectic pace affords little time for leisure, but Burke said she tends to immerse herself in movies or P. D. James and Tony Hillerman mysteries “when I’m tired of reading what’s in my briefcase.”