April 14, 1983

Governor Cuomo has stepped into the strike against the Metro-North Commuter Railroad with a series of statements in the last two weeks, but exactly what the Governor is trying to accomplish is not clear, even to the participants in the negotiations. With 90,000 commuters inconvenienced, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the talks deadlocked, Mr. Cuomo says he wantsthe strike to end. Beyond that, he describes himself as impartial, insisting he has favored neither side but simply wants both to negotiate. In addition, he is pleading with the Federal Government to take action as the impasse continues.

The highest-ranking Angolan official to visit Washington held an unpublicized meeting this afternoon with Secretary of State George P. Shultz to discuss South Africa's occupation of South-West Africa and the presence of Cuban troops in Angola, Administration officials said. The officials said the visitor, Lieut. Col. Manuel Alexandre Rodrigues, held talks with State Department officials and might meet Vice President Bush on Thursday or Friday. Colonel Rodrigues, who is Interior Minister, is regarded as the No.2 man in Angola. The United States and Angola have no diplomatic relations, and the possibility of establishing ties after a withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola was also discussed in the last few days, officials said.

The unusual sight of corporate managers being laid off during the recession has helped feed the notion that the ranks of managers are being thinned. But national data do not bear this out. Instead, despite two back-to-back recessions and a widely held belief that management had become swollen and top-heavy, its ranks have continued to grow. By December 1982, there were nearly 9 percent more managers and administrators in the American economy than in January 1980, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is in sharp contrast to the nearly 1 percent decline in overall employment and the 12 percent drop in blue-collar jobs during the same period. 'Contrasting Economic Worlds' ''After all the discussion about the squeeze on middle management, the striking thing is that management has grown at all,'' said Samuel Ehrenhalt, regional commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the New York region. ''It tells us something about the contrasting economic worlds we are moving to, where some groups are going up sharply while others are plummeting.''

The Ford Motor Company earned a profit producing automobiles and trucks in North America in the first quarter of this year, Philip Caldwell, the chairman of Ford, said today. It would be the first time since 1979 that the No.2 auto maker had made money in its basic line of business on this continent, a segment of the company that lost $2.1 billion in 1980 and lesser amounts in the past two years. Mr. Caldwell, in an interview in his office at Ford's headquarters here, did not disclose the size of the profit in the United States and Canada or the company's overall results, other than to say the quarter would be ''comfortably in the black.'' The auto maker reported a loss of $506 million in the United States for the first quarter of 1982, and a loss of $52 million in its Canadian operations in the same period. Other operations were profitable, however, reducing the company's 1982 first-quarter loss to $355 million.

The Scouting column in Sports Pages on Tuesday gave an incorrect date for the Manhattan Island Swim- ming Marathon. It is set for July 24.