Hope Feels the Squeeze at Jobless Office : Unemployment: Lines get longer and offers of work are few. Job seekers and staff members find that a good attitude helps.

As on most days, Sylvia Apodaca was waiting for the phone to ring.

A clerk in the state unemployment office in City of Commerce, she fields calls from businesses seeking workers. Of late, it has been an idle, depressing task.

All morning, only two potential employers called--one looking for a clerk, another for a receptionist. It was so slow that Apodaca was unable to train a staff member from another office in how to place employers’ requests for workers in the computer.

“It’s an awful situation” said the 33-year-old Apodaca, whose phone has grown increasingly silent as the lines of the jobless steadily lengthen in the City of Commerce unemployment office.

The latest unemployment statistics show that California’s jobless rate has edged to 7.1%, well above the national average of 6.1%. That comes as no surprise to Apodaca and her 74 co-workers, who staff one of the state’s largest and busiest unemployment offices.

It is in such places as the City of Commerce office, a cavernous building with a sea of desks, where the gloomy statistics assume an even bleaker meaning, where pride and economic reality collide.

Last week, lines of unemployed workers snaked out the front door. Office manager Alexandra Gutierrez, 47, was forced to increase the number of receptionists from one to four to help direct the crush of people, most of them Eastside blue-collar workers and immigrants.

“We have suffered several plant closures--shoe factories, food packing companies, plastic bag makers,” Gutierrez said of the past year. “This area has seen 771 employees laid off as a result of plant closures between March and December of 1990. Packers, machine operators, drivers, warehouse workers have all lost their jobs.”

In the waiting area, about 100 jobless men and women sat on plastic chairs or stood along the walls, facing glass-lined booths where interviewers hoped to help one client every five minutes.

The wait for those five minutes sometimes took more than two hours. To pass time, one small group of men read--and reread--a job opening for printers posted on the bulletin board. Few talked. No one smiled.

Behind one counter, Esther Sapien, an employment program interviewer, sat with stacks of benefit forms and applications. A machine repairman, who had completed his paperwork, hoped to receive $74 a week. But Sapien’s computer showed that his Social Security number belonged to someone else.

“This Social Security number was bought or lent out,” Sapien said. “We get a lot of that.” The repairman said nothing, took his application and left.

Another man had worked hanging frozen chickens in a slaughterhouse. He quit because the cold temperatures caused arthritis in his hands. Although he is eligible for unemployment benefits, he said he wants to work for his money. He explained to Sapien that he has been trying to find a job through the unemployment office for six months and was told he would be notified of possible openings.

“Nobody calls,” he told her.

“I put myself in their place, try to help them out as best I can,” Sapien, an eight-year employee, said between clients. “But what can I do?”

The hardest part of her job, she said, is the exhaustion she feels at the end of each day. “It’s the talking and talking and talking all the time.”

Anthony Carlin, 29, of Montebello looked defiant and proud as he waited to speak to an interviewer. “I’m not applying for unemployment insurance,” he was sure to say. He was there only to “see what jobs are available.”

The bearded, dark-haired mason had been unemployed for a month after working 10 years for the same company. Things were so tough, Carlin said, that “the contractor I was working for is working as a bricklayer for another contractor because he can’t find work.”

As higher-income wage earners are forced to take lower-paying jobs, it becomes harder for lower-income or less-skilled workers to find work, office manager Gutierrez said. “It’s difficult enough in the best of times,” she said. “But in times like this everyone gets pushed back further.”

Lorenzo Gonzales, a 37-year-old roofer from East Los Angeles, has been jobless more than a year and has long since exhausted his unemployment benefits, which stop after 26 weeks.

A short man with dark hair and a mustache, Gonzales was calm while relating his failed attempts to find another full-time job. He had been with the same roofing company for eight years before being laid off, he said. Like many interviewed, he ended his story on a hopeful note. “They want me back, as soon as things get better.”

For now, he was thankful for a lead that one of the state workers had given him, that a company would be taking applications in two weeks for asbestos cleanup work.

“That stuff can get in your skin and kill you,” he said, “but it’s money. You have to take what you can get.”

From both sides of the counter, people said it was important to know how to cope with the reality of the times.

“You can’t get panicky,” Gonzales said. “You can always get side jobs. Start getting panicky and you get into trouble.”

“You can’t get emotionally involved,” Apodaca said, still waiting for the phone to ring. “A lot of people that come in, they want to feel somebody’s concerned. But if you let them go on talking, they don’t stop. And you have this big old line, waiting.”