Foreign Workers in Saudi Arabia Getting Edgy : Economy: Many feel their employers, bowing to official pressure, may not be taking adequate steps to ensure their safety.

Michael Ross of The Times’ Washington Bureau is a member of the Pentagon press pool currently in Saudi Arabia. This report was written for the pool, whose members are not allowed to disclose their exact location.

At a party the other night for workers from abroad, the mood was almost jovial, until a young Briton spoke up.

“Have you heard?” he asked, fidgeting nervously with a plastic cup of Pepsi. “British Aerospace has issued its employees gas masks and nerve-gas antidotes.”

“At least that’s something,” a young American replied. “Nobody’s doing that for us. Nobody’s doing much of anything for us.”

While the world’s attention is focused on the plight of Western hostages in Kuwait and Iraq, resentment is starting to build among an even larger group of foreigners in Saudi Arabia, who feel that their employers, bowing to official pressure, may not be taking adequate steps to ensure their safety.

No one is holding them hostage, but concern is growing among the thousands of foreigners who work in the kingdom’s Eastern province that they could be trapped here if war breaks out in the Persian Gulf.

“So far,” an American businessman here said, “it’s only the joint venture companies, the ones being run by their foreign partners, that have taken steps to ensure the safety of their employees. The Saudi companies have done nothing for their foreign employees.”

After the initial wave of panic caused by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, the mood in the foreign community has calmed considerably.

“Having American forces here has been like a tranquilizer,” said Tom Wright, a contractor from Alberta, Canada. “Just seeing soldiers who look like they know what they’re doing is a tonic.”

Wright said that although the arrival of U.S. forces has allayed fears of an Iraqi invasion, reports that Iraq has deployed chemical weapons north of the border in Kuwait--on rockets capable of reaching Saudi Arabia--have everyone “really worried.”

Saudi officials could provide no exact breakdown of the number of foreigners living in Eastern province, which extends south from Kuwait down the west coast of the Persian Gulf.

But U.S. diplomats said that before the invasion of Kuwait, there were at least 12,000 Americans here, most of them clustered around the coastal oil towns of Dhahran, Dammam, Ras Tannurah and Jubayl, 150 to 200 miles south of the Kuwaiti border.

About 4,000 dependents were evacuated soon after the invasion, and another 2,000 to 3,000 were vacationing outside Saudi Arabia at the time and have not returned. The remainder, who account for roughly half the original American presence in Eastern province, are still here, according to U.S. consular officials.

Most of them work for Aramco, the Saudi-owned Arabian American Oil Co., which with 45,000 workers is the region’s largest employer.

Aramco spokesmen said the company is operating on a business-as-usual basis and that all dependents who wanted to leave have been evacuated at company expense.

However, interviews with Aramco workers over the last few days suggest that the company has gone to extraordinary lengths to pressure many who would otherwise have left into staying.

Some smaller companies are offering bonuses of up to 25% for employees who elect to stay, but Aramco management has told its employees, according to several sources, that the only way they can leave is to quit their jobs on 30 days’ notice.

“They’ve made it clear,” one said, “that if we quit, we lose everything . . . all our benefits, severance pay and belongings, unless we pay to move our things ourselves.”

Most foreign firms operating here have also agreed to repatriate non-essential employees, but Aramco officials have indicated that they make no such distinction between essential and non-essential personnel.

“When someone comes to me and asks, ‘Am I essential?’ my response is ‘You’re getting a paycheck,’ ” Aramco spokesman Sydney Bower said.

If this seems to be an insensitive response to the concerns of Aramco employees, other officials say privately that it reflects the company’s fears of what will happen if its foreign work force panics and leaves the country.

Although foreigners constitute only about a quarter of Aramco’s work force, many of them are in vital, high-technology maintenance jobs.

“The ‘expat’ community working for Aramco is on the edge,” a company executive said, “and if the scale tips a little further, you could have a real exodus out of here. If that happens, the Saudis would be in real trouble. They have enough trained people of their own to run the oil fields, but after a month or so, maintenance would probably break down.”

At a time when the Saudis are planning to increase oil production by 2 million barrels a day to help the West sustain its boycott of Kuwaiti and Iraqi crude oil, such a development “could spell disaster” for the international effort to isolate Iraq, the official said.

The issue is such a sensitive one that company officials generally do not talk about it publicly.

However, employees say Aramco’s failure to make contingency plans for an evacuation, together with its refusal even to consider repatriating less essential staff such as secretaries and company schoolteachers, has left a residue of bitterness.

“Aramco has no evacuation plans,” an executive with an American firm said. “Their position is: ‘We’re a Saudi company. We’re already home, and we’re not going anywhere.’ ”

Under Saudi law, foreigners who live in the kingdom must surrender their passports to their employer, who then handles all necessary paperwork with customs and immigration.

To travel outside the province of his or her residence, a foreigner must obtain a special letter of authorization through the employer. To leave the country, an employee must get a special exit visa stamped in his passport.

According to Ted Bevec, an executive with the American Businessmen’s Assn., most foreign companies got exit-and-re-entry visas for their foreign staffers a few days after the invasion. No one used them, he said, but “just knowing they had the visas and could leave if they wanted to eased a lot of panic.”

Aramco workers said the company had not done this for them.

“They told us that because we would have to break contract and resign in order to go out, the exit visas would take 30 days to get,” one employee said.

Even so, as many as 600 Aramco employees have resigned since the crisis began, and “more resignations are landing in managers’ in-trays every day,” a company official said.

Most of the resignations involve Filipino, Pakistani and other Asian employees, whom the Saudis generally hold in lower esteem than the Arab and Western nationals living in their country.