Major Mobilization

ne day in early November last year, a key and an address arrived in a package at Joseph Boyce's home. Arriving at the building on the appointed day, he met Steve Caldwell, who was headed for the same place at the same time.

"We found one another in the elevator, opened the door and came in to see what was here. It was an enormous space with a lot of supplies, and we started from scratch and built the office," says Boyce, manager of the local census office in Alexandria, Va.

Within several months, about 400 people were working out of the office to record addresses in nine counties. The operation shrank when that was over, after about five weeks, expanded again to several hundred employees for a check of addresses from other sources, then shrank again. The peak will be next spring and early summer, when the biggest workload hits -- trying to find those people who don't respond to the large mailing of census questionnaires. Then, the in-house staff could be as large as 100 and the field staff will number around 1,500, even though the office will be responsible for a smaller area as other offices open.

The pattern followed by the Alexandria office is being repeated in other local census offices across the country. Federal agencies open and close offices all the time, but it's rare that such activities are carried out so quickly, with such variations in workload while they are in operation, and with the need to prepare to shut it all down in a matter of months-plus doing it all with temporary employees.

Even the managers are temps-in the case of the Alexandria office, the appointments will not go past September 2000. In an economy in which virtually anyone with skills can get a permanent position, it might seem that managers would be unwilling to work under such conditions. But in this office, at least, Census Bureau officials didn't have any trouble finding managers.

"Probably the most important [reason] was it was a chance to do something for our nation and our government," says Boyce, an Air Force retiree. "I feel gratified to be part of this. It's more than patriotism, if you will, but I'm very proud to be part of Census 2000."

"This is a chance to go back and work for our country a little bit, and I think it's a neat thing to be able to tell your kids I was involved in the census at the turn of the century," says Caldwell, the office's assistant manager for field operations and also an Air Force veteran.

Similar factors are motivating field employees. They range in age from new high school graduates to elderly and in education level from GEDs to PhDs. Many told the managers they want to give something to the nation, including immigrants who said they felt an obligation to pay back the country that took them in. The variety of responsibilities and speed of change in operations is also attractive to both employees and managers. "The uniqueness of this job is hard to describe and hard to get away from," says Caldwell. "There aren't very many outfits out there where in an extremely short period of time you go from 12 people in an office to 1,200 people and then back down to 20 people in literally weeks."

Most of the managers in the office are either retired from the military or at least have performed some military service. They're finding that background useful. The census is "kind of like a military operation," says David Hellum, assistant manager for administration at the office and a retired Marine. "We're going to be going through one of the nation's largest manpower mobilizations."