Broader Federal Safety Checks at Plants Ordered

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration reversed a Reagan Administration regulatory tenet Tuesday, ordering its inspectors to examine hazardous areas of factories in addition to their job injury and illness records.

“Now when we go into a plant, the inspector is going to see what it looks like beyond the office,” said Assistant Labor Secretary John A. Pendergrass, who ordered the new policy. “Our compliance officers will see the conditions as they exist in the work areas.”

The change will take effect Monday, on the eve of Senate hearings on a two-year congressional investigation into what critics maintain has been OSHA’s excessive reliance on employer records in ferreting out job hazards.

Hearings’ Role Downplayed

Pendergrass and other agency officials said the hearings and the congressional investigation were not the impetus behind the new policy.

“We’ve been discussing a change like this for two years, and it’s just now coming to fruition,” said Frank White, the agency’s deputy administrator.

As one of the Administration’s first policy changes in President Reagan’s promise to get the government “off the backs” of business, OSHA in 1982 began exempting plants in high-hazard industries from inspections if their logs showed injury rates below the nationwide average for manufacturing.

Unions and some officials in other government agencies have complained that the exemptions encouraged employers to under-report their job injuries and illnesses in OSHA-required “lost work day” reports in order to avoid plant inspections.

Cyanide Poisoning Case

Their case was bolstered by the death of a worker from cyanide poisoning at a film processing plant in Chicago in 1983, six months after OSHA had pronounced the firm in accord with its regulations after an inspection of its injury and illness logs.

An inspection of the plant after the death showed widespread health and safety violations, resulting in recommendations for criminal prosecution of some of the company’s officials.

“That case has been in everybody’s mind,” Pendergrass said Tuesday. “It’s something we don’t want to happen again.”

He said the walk-through examinations in addition to the record inspections at some 2,000 plants each year will give the agency “better confidence on what the conditions are on the shop floor.”

OSHA officials played down the significance of the change, describing it as a logical next step in a crackdown on violators of the law that began two years ago when William E. Brock III took over as labor secretary.