What was going on when I was born?

''NO BACKWARD STEP!'' The battle cry, coined by John L. Lewis in the 1920's to rally his coal-smudged army of union miners against pay cuts, epitomizes the adversarial spirit that has characterized the approach of both labor and management at most bargaining tables since then. Now, under the impact of the recession, foreign competition and signs of rigor mortis in some key industries, many unions are taking a less belligerent tack and finding their employers ready to join in accommodations that entail significant surrender of prerogatives on both sides. It is far too early to forecast that the more conciliatory mood will be either widespread or permanent, but it already embraces unions and companies that have been traditional pattern setters in industrial relations. ''We've all become Japanese in recognizing that we can no longer afford the luxury of business as usual,'' Ray Marshall, Secretary of Labor in the Carter Administration, said. In return for wage freezes, deferral of benefits and relaxation of restrictive work rules, management has given unions in distressed industries guarantees against plant closings, consultative rights on capital outlays and other investment plans, access to confidential data on costs and competition and expanded employee participation in decision-maki ng on plant and production prob lems.

Federal programs specially intended for poor people would sustain proportionally deeper cuts than other Government benefit programs under President Reagan's budget for the coming year. The budget would not only reduce the rate of growt h but would also cut the absol ute level of Federal spending on the three biggest social welfar e programs: food stamps, Medicaid and Aid to Families with Dependen t Children. Federal outlays for the three programs, expected to r each $36.5 billion in the current fiscal year, would be cut back to $ 32 billion in the next year, a reduction of 12.3 percent, acco rding to data in the budget. Rise for Social Security The President sought much deeper cuts in subsidized housing, job training and education programs that mainly benefit low-income people.

SIR FREDDIE LAKER makes sparks. He made sparks in igniting air-fare wars over the North Atlantic and he made sparks in declaring bankruptcy. The ques tion of the moment is whe ther Laker Airways' collapse, provoked this month when its banker s cut off its lifeline, will prove as trend-setting as did Sir Freddi e's fare cutting. Some other airline officers fear that things are j ust that ominous. ''What's going to happen,'' said Howard D. Putnam, the new chief executive of the Braniff International Corporation, ''is that you will have fewer airlines flying. And the airlines probably won't make that decision as much as the lenders will. If, by this summer, we don't generate traffic, we won't be able to continue. It happened to Laker.'' ''There's too much competition,'' added Roy M. Rawls, senior vice president for finance at Continental Airlines. ''You've got overcapacity, discounting and all the problems associated with deregulation.''

In 1976, in the midst of a real-estate recession, a home builder named Gary Minchew of Valdosta, Ga., went to a seminar on how to save money in construction. He says he has never been the same since. He had already poured the concrete and ordered the lumber for a house he was building. By the time he finished framing that house, using the new techniques he had learned at the seminar, he was able to return a third of the lumber. When the construction was finished, his total savings on the thousand-square-foot house were $1,406.15. Besides the savings on materials, he cut labor costs by 35 cents a square foot because the studs, which provide the vertical structural frame, were placed 24 inches apart instead of 16 inches. He also saved $276 by eliminating asphalt sheathing between studs and siding, $2.30 on each corner by eliminating one board, and $86.60 by eliminating a board known as a double-top plate between the frame and the roof.

IN circumstances that are unusual for a new shopping center, the Stamford Town Center, a huge urban renewal complex, is to open Thursday with its two anchor stores but minus its connecting mall and the 132 small stores and service establishments expected within it. The complete six-level, atrium-style mall is to have a delayed opening on April 22. For the anchor stores, Macy's and J.C. Penney, the mall area that is centered on a grand court may seem like a ghost town for two months. And for the Taubman Company of Troy, Mich., one of the nation's largest shopping-center developers and a co-developer in the Stamford Town Center with the F.D. Rich Company, the opening of a mall-less center is a first.

WASHINGTON RONALD Reagan got almost everything he wanted from Congress last year, using to full effect his personal charm, a flair for oratory and a sure sense of political direction. After the uncertain zig-zag pragmatism of Jimmy Carter, his ideological self-assurance seemed to fill a popular ache for leadership. This year, however, President Reagan's unswerving commitment to supply side economics and determination to stick with his original economic game plan despite spreading recession may be a liability. For in the $757.6 billion budget for the next fiscal year that was formally submitted to Congress last week, he has overridden the advice of White House aides and Congressional Republican leaders to moderate his strategy. He has prompted Democratic catcalls about a ''Beverly Hills budget'' and left Republicans shaken and deeply worried that he may be leading the nation and their party toward disaster. If the President is right - if Reaganomics produces economic recovery without a new burst of inflation - he will harvest a political bonanza. But there is such widespread disbelief in Congress that he faces revolt from his supporters; Congress may take away the ini tiative unless he is willing to compromise .

THE little East End village of Quogue lies off the beaten path. It is a quiet place where the ambience of an earlier era can still be felt, especially along Quogue Street, the main t horoughfare lined with graceful old houses. Farther east, Hampton Bays and East Quogue draw a young crowd in summer to discos on the dunes; to the west, boutiques, beachfront condominiums and an array of lively night spots have transformed Westhampton Beach from the small village it was 10 years ago to a busy hub of tourist activity. Now some Quogue residents are fearful that new construction may destroy what careful zoning, a location well off the Montauk Highway and the patrician concern of its many wealthy inhabitants have so far managed to preserve. Alarmed by a rate of some 150 building permits issued annually in a village of approximately 1,000 houses, they recently unveiled a plan aimed at protecting the character of the older part of the village, known as Old Quogue.

ONLY one certainty has surfaced in the maelstrom unleashed by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company antitrust settlement: Local telephone rates will go up. However, the company, Government regulators and consumers disagree on the reasons behind those increases. Commissioner Edward H. Hynes of the state's Board of Public Utilities predicts that a tripling of local telephone rates is ''far from unimaginable,'' and he places the blame squarely on the agreement reached Jan. 8 in the Justice Department's settlement of its eight-year-old antitrust proceeding against A.T.& T. ''Speaking as a citizen who lives in New Jersey, I can't comprehend how, in punishing A.T.& T. for alleged infractions of the antitrust law, they will become more profitable and I will end up paying more,'' Mr. Hynes said. However, A.T.& T. officials have argued that telephone rates, while increasing at about 10 percent annually over the next few years, will not be affected by the settlement. Charles Brown, A.T.& T. chairman, told reporters that inflation and accelerated depreciation - not the settlement -would push up rates.

Bearing the coffin of a white trade union organizer who died in detention and the flag of the outlawed African National Congress, a cortege of more than 1,000 blacks and whites wound its way slowly for about four miles today through downtown Johannesburg and its white suburbs. In the South African context, where demonstrations against white minority rule are almost automatically proclaimed to be ''riotous assemblies,'' it was a startling sight - almost certainly the largest display of black political feeling to have been seen in the white areas here since the Congress movement was forced underground in 1960 by a banning order. The police, carrying riot equipment, were stationed along the route, but the procession was allowed to proceed, in defiance of laws that make it a crime to show support for a banned organization. When it came within half a mile of the segregated white cemetery where Dr. Neil Aggett was to be buried, the casket was removed from the hearse and carried in the front rank of the marchers who strode in front of a convoy of about 17 buses.

THE MOSQUITO COAST By Paul Theroux With Woodcuts by David Frampton. 374 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. $13.95. Though any discerning reader of Paul Theroux's novels and travel books recognizes that he is a writer who commands language with admirable intelligence and grace, it may be less evident that his writing is much more than sophisticated entertainment. He is clearly a novelist with predecessors - other writers whose styles and genres he appropriates and exploits - and these predecessors, though often considerable, are not always the kind we expect an ambitious and sober young writer to emulate. In ''The Family Arsenal,'' for instance, Theroux seems equally indebted to the Conrad of ''The Secret Agent,'' the young Graham Greene and any number of American detective story writers. In ''The Black House'' he plays with the stuff of popular Gothic novels; in ''Saint Jack'' and ''The Consul's File,'' he draws on a tradition of Anglo-colonial fiction that includes Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling as well as E.M. Forster, George Orwell and the younger Anthony Burgess. Can so dependent and eclectic a talent, we may wonder, really be important?

The failure to execute plays in the final minutes has been a major reason why the Knicks have lost 13 of their last 19 games. The pattern continued last night in a 114-107 loss to the Philadelphia 76ers at Madison Square Garden. It was the fifth straight victory for the 76ers and their ninth in the last 11 games. The triumph moved Philadelphia to a half-game behind the first-place Boston Celtics in the Atlantic Division. The Knicks dropped to 23-28, last in the division.

IN 1982, the world economy, which has been growing increasingly interdependent for decades, is being subjected to the most powerful disintegrative pressures, both economic and political, of the postwar period. Foremost among these pressures are recession and rising unemployment. In the United States, Canada, Britain, West Germany and the other Western industrialized countries, the slump is expected to lift total unemployment to 28.5 million workers in the second half of this year. High youth unemployment is exacerbating radicalism in Western Europe. Economists at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are projecting that, for 1982 as a whole, unemployment in the United States will average 9 percent; in Canada, 8 1/4 percent; in Britain, 12 percent; in West Germany, 6 percent; in France, 8 1/2 percent and in the rest of the O.E.C.D. countries, 10 1/4 percent. North American will have 10 3/4 million out of work, while 16 million Western Europeans will be jobless. These are the highest levels since World War II. Only in Japan, thanks not only to its continued strong economic growth and export performance but also to its labor-management policies, is the jobless rate expected to be as low as 2 1/4 percent, only a little above its postwar average.