May 11, 1983

The pilots at Eastern Air Lines Inc. could end up with a 21 percent stake in the airline in return for about $100 million in work-rule and benefits concessions, according to a top official of the pilots' union. In a taped telephone message to his members, Richard H. Heckenberger, a pilot at Eastern and the chairman of Council 51 of the Airline Pilots Association, said that the agreement reached last Friday calls on Eastern to issue ''subordinated debt securities that will be converted into equity.'' Mr. Heckenberger added: ''This will mean we will own 21 percent of Eastern Airlines, which is one hell of a statement. Never before in the airline industry has this happened.''

NEW YORK CITY has more than 14,000 restaurants, some of which seem to change identities like movie marquees. So it is no small feat for the city's Health Department to keep keep track of them, let alone monitor them for cleanliness. What makes the task even more difficult is that the department has only 17 full-time restaurant inspectors. Albert Simms is one of them. ''Look at those baked goods on the counter top,'' Mr. Simms said, glancing furtively at the pastry display in a delicatessen near City Hall in Manhattan. ''There are two problems: the custard-filled pastries should be refrigerated - bacteria love that environment - and there should be a sneeze guard over them.'' Mr. Simms, a sanitarian with the city's Department of Health, spends his days in restaurants and food shops poking behind refrigerators, sticking thermometers in salads and snooping around basement storerooms.

New York State's highest court ruled today that landlords have the right to evict unrelated people who are sharing an apartment without the landlord's consent. The decision by the State Court of Appeals held that a tenant who invited a male friend to move into her apartment without notifying the landlord had violated the terms of her lease. Most leases in New York City limit occupancy of the apartment to the person who signs the lease and members of the tenant's immediate family. Attorneys for both sides in the case said the decision could affect thousands of unmarried couples and could also apply to unrelated roommates and homosexual couples.

The Reagan Administration moved today toward adoption of a new negotiating position in strategic arms talks with the Soviet Union. The move was widely seen as an effort to placate Congressional critics of the MX missile. Congressional and White House sources said the National Security Council, at a meeting in the White House today, generally favored the concept that American negotiators should put more stress on limiting nuclear warheads and less on the number of missile launchers. But details of the new position are being worked out and a final decision awaits another meeting this month, the sources said.

China awarded an offshore oil exploration contract today to a group of Western companies headed by British Petroleum. The contract was the first to result from China's first official round of bidding for oil concessions, in which 33 foreign companies participated last year. There were no American oil companies in the B.P. group, although at least 15 had submitted bids to China. A Western commercial specialist said that the Chinese had hoped to announce more contracts, but that some of the American concerns had held out for better terms. The companies are finding that the slackened world demand for oil, and the consequent decline in price, has made the potential oil off China less exciting.