Opportunity Lines

When television sets out to perform a worthwhile service, there is hardly anything that can beat it. The latest service is a weekly employment office of the air, which in seven months has spread to 14 U.S. cities.

The format calls for an announcer to read off a list of job openings for anything from a $64-a-week busboy to a $200-a-week accountant. Some offers are for temporary jobs, such as the recent call in Chicago for a $40-a-day bodyguard. Next, personnel managers and employment counselors discuss opportunities or show films on such subjects as apprenticeship programs and interview techniques. The kicker is of ten a success story -- a former viewer tells how he got his job as a result of watching the program. Repeatedly during the broadcast, the phone number of the nearest state employment office is flashed on the screen.

At Chicago's WBBM-TV, eight seconds after the show signs on, all 30 phone lines are tied up. The morning after a Jobathon on Los Angeles' KTTV-TV last August, 6,000 applicants were queued outside of California state employment offices.

Ghetto Communication. Most of those job seekers were from slum areas, for the program is everywhere targeted primarily at minority groups. Edward Kenefick, general manager of Chicago's WBBM-TV, got the idea for the show when Urban League officials asked him to help find employment for young Negroes. The newspapers were full of want-ads, but only one-seventh of ghetto families see a paper, while two-thirds have TV sets.

The other difficulty, says Matthew Robinson, a Negro and producer-host of Opportunity Line on Philadelphia's WCAU-TV, is to break through the ghetto dweller's "apprehension or reticence" about visiting an employment office. Even so, about half of the viewers who phone WCAU-TV for information on Saturday go to the employment office the next week. And why not? About half of them get work, and many others wind up in training programs or counseling that eventually makes them employable.

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