U.S. Workers See Hitches in Enforcing Embargo

American workers in Libya, many of them with oil industry jobs paying salaries averaging $96,000 a year, predicted Wednesday that President Reagan will have difficulty enforcing his economic embargo.

A Texan, who like others here would not be identified, questioned whether Reagan has a constitutional right to order American workers out of Libya. Others said U.S. companies probably will not be able to comply with the Feb. 1 deadline for shutting down operations because their contracts with state-owned Libyan companies demand 30 days’ notice.

The U.S. measures include a near-total ban on business contacts by Americans with the regime of Col. Moammar Kadafi and an order that as many as 1,500 Americans working in Libya leave the country.

Still, individual Americans expressed little fear for their safety. One woman reached by telephone at a school attended by children of Americans who work in the oil industry said that she and her husband will “probably stay.”

Even such fragmentary information is not easy to come by. Government escorts are assigned to Western reporters, so it is difficult to obtain other than official information. Most diplomats will not talk to Western journalists by telephone, and non-official Libyans seem to fear reprisals if they talk.

U.S. citizens working here “are not hassled,” a diplomat who knows several Americans in Libya told the Washington Post before the freezing of Libyan assets was announced. “On the contrary, they get special treatment. Let’s face it, (the Libyans) need them here--the oil industry, it’s the Americans who still run it,” the diplomat said.

Americans who work in the field commonly put in 30-day shifts followed by 10-day leaves usually spent out of the country, diplomats said. Those working in the cities live in comfortable seaside compounds.

The Libyans prefer to hire Americans with at least 15 years’ experience. In the United States, by contrast, experienced technicians may be thought too old to be hired.

“This is not a country for everybody,” a Texan worker told the Post. “You have a language problem. You also have a food problem.

“You have to go hunting, I call it, for food,” he said.

On Friday, his one day off, the hunt takes him and his friends to farmers selling chickens and vegetables outside Tripoli. In the capital, the shelves of supermarkets are virtually bare.