Taking Out the Chill

ORDINARILY, the 325-man Office of Emergency Preparedness deals with damage done by such natural disasters as hurricanes and earthquakes. Last week OEP suddenly found itself handling the results of a man-made storm for which it was decidedly unprepared. Without warning, President Nixon plucked the tiny agency out of the anonymity of the U.S. Government Organization Manual to supervise the wage-price freeze.

The OEP director, Brigadier General George Lincoln, was on his ranch near Denver when he got the White House call to action. He phoned his eight regional directors and sent them scurrying. "Get a bunch of borrowed people," he advised. "We don't want to pay them." The morning after the President's announcement, Lincoln's men set up improvised regional offices in ten major cities. In the Midwest, the branch moved from Battle Creek, Mich., to Chicago. In Georgia, OEP-ers transferred from Thomasville to Atlanta, where they found room in an insurance office sandwiched between two topless restaurants, one of them called The Booby Hatch. They were scarcely settled before the telephones started ringing.

Nixon's mandate was a tall order for one of the smallest agencies in the federal establishment. Set up in 1961, OEP's primary duty is preparing for civilian defense in case of nuclear attack. It has been given the additional jobs of stockpiling strategic materials and coordinating disaster relief.

Some 35 economists specializing in stabilization under emergency conditions serve on OEP's staff, and their training was recognized as an invaluable asset for the current task. So, too, was the agency's reputation for moving quickly into a disaster area and getting out just as fast when a job was done. That sort of experience doubtless appealed to President Nixon, who at the moment has little intention of setting up a bureaucracy on the scale of the OPA, or even the Korean War wage-price control boards.

For all its practice in emergencies, though, OEP quickly showed the strain of its first days on the new job. Manpower was urgently needed, and was borrowed haphazardly from other Government agencies. Highly paid federal economists, HUD officials and even agriculture experts found themselves answering phones in regional offices. Nevertheless, OEP could not cope with the flood of queries. In the Washington headquarters a block from the White House, confusion was compounded as cameramen tangled lines with telephone installers. -

Even when they had time to answer the phones, OEP staffers often could not answer the questions. They had to wait for the Cost of Living Council to provide guidelines for a wide variety of puzzlers. Chrysler Corp., for example, asked if the import surcharge applied to tax-free automobiles that were supplied to the diplomatic community. (Answer: maybe.) Many people wanted to know how to distinguish between raw foods, which are not subject to price control, and processed foods, which are. In some cases, that was easy to answer. Whatever is totally unprocessed--eggs, oranges, fresh fish--escapes control. Most meats are processed and therefore subject to the freeze. Still, the status of many foods remained in doubt. Does shelling almonds amount to processing? one caller wanted to know. Again the answer was maybe. Government Economist Sidney L. Jones offered a tongue-in-cheek rule of thumb for baffled consumers: "Anything that snaps, crunches, bites or quivers when you eat it is not frozen."

Uncertain how to handle reports of freeze violations, OEP simply recorded them and filed them away. Later, the Justice Department will decide whether to prosecute. The first complaint to Washington came from an irate consumer who was asked to pay $2.80 for a carton of cigarettes that had cost him only $2.60 the week before. Next came a call from a boarder who said that his landlord told him either to pay more rent or eat one less meal a day. By and large, the complaints were low-keyed and did not involve extravagant sums of money.

When they could not provide answers, OEP staffers tried at least to be reassuring. After all, everyone was in the same boat. In Chicago, Michael Sanders, an attorney in the Agriculture Department, commiserated with a man who complained about not getting his raise. "I know," said Sanders. "I had an increase coming. This freeze has thrown a monkey wrench into the whole thing." Helen Balch, an appraiser on loan from HUD, discussed with a caller whether to put off a trip to Europe.

Eventually, guidelines began to take shape. Prices and wages are frozen at their highest level during the 30 days ending Aug. 14; imported goods are excepted. Included are most wholesale and retail goods; rents; bus, air and train fares; doctor, dentist and lawyer fees; telephone, electricity and gas costs; commission and insurance rates. Exempt from control are previously announced school tuition rates, even though they have not yet become effective, and state and local taxes.

No raises or cost of living increases will be allowed except in cases of promotions to jobs with more responsibility. Thus those railroad workers of the United Transportation Union who had not yet ratified an agreement reached on their behalf on Aug. 2 will not get their raises until Nov. 12 at the ear liest. In California, employees of General Telephone Co. had reached a tentative agreement giving them about the same pay raise granted to employees of the Bell System. The Bell workers ratified their agreements the day before the freeze took effect; the General Telephone employees, on the other hand, delayed. "So General workers doing the same work that Bell workers are doing will get lower wage rates during the freeze," noted a communications union spokesman. "We're sorry, but that's it."

At the end of the week OEP remained swamped by far more work than it could handle. Other agencies were recruited to come to the rescue. In some 200 cities, Taxpayer Assistance offices of the Internal Revenue Service began to take over some of the inquiries that were flooding into OEP. The Agriculture Department's Stabilization and Conservation Service started fielding questions in rural areas. All together, some 1,500 federal employees are now feeding out information and relaying it back to Washington in a unique operation of improvisation.

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