Corporations Urged to Stress Worker Safety : Labor: The head of OSHA is writing business leaders asking them to pay more attention to hazardous conditions.

Worried that health and safety are taking a back seat to productivity, the Labor Department’s top workplace safety official said Tuesday that he is writing letters to the chairmen of the nation’s 1,000 biggest corporations urging them to pay more attention to hazardous working conditions.

Gerard F. Scannell, head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and a former corporate safety executive, said the letters--an unusual gesture from an Administration that is generally friendly to big business--will complain that some business leaders do not follow through on routine pledges to protect their workers.

“The health and safety message does not hit the factory floor the way it left the boardroom,” Scannell said in a speech in Anaheim to a Western regional conference of the National Safety Council.

What tends to be echoed far more loudly in factories and offices are corporate demands for higher productivity--demands that often lead to unsafe practices, Scannell said.

“Top management provides the motivating force. Management has to demonstrate that safety is equal to quality and production,” he said.

Scannell was director of corporate safety and environmental affairs at Johnson & Johnson before becoming head of OSHA two years ago. He has been credited by some OSHA critics with giving new energy and credibility to the agency.

He said Tuesday that he believes many businesses have yet to grasp the high cost of workplace accidents and illnesses.

“Take a company operating on a 5% profit margin,” he said. “Let’s say their workers’ compensation losses during a year are $25,000. That’s not much, but it means they have to make another $500,000 (in gross sales) to recover those losses.”

Addressing other safety and health concerns, Scannell said:

* Despite the soaring number of injuries and illnesses attributed to improperly designed work environments, it will be three to five years before OSHA issues ergonomic standards requiring all businesses to systematically improve the relationship between worker and machine.

So far OSHA has issued less-binding ergonomics guidelines in one industry--meatpacking.

* OSHA’s proposal to require all workers to wear seat belts when driving on the job should go into effect by the end of the year. In addition, workers who ride motorcycles to make deliveries would have to wear helmets. Scannell said the new rules are justified because more than 40% of all on-the-job fatalities are the result of motor vehicle accidents.

* Additional regulations requiring better safety on construction projects--now the subject of proposed legislation--are needed. “We have not made much of a difference in this industry,” he acknowledged.

* He hopes to persuade the Bush Administration to support the development of new standards regulating indoor air quality. Such standards would crack down on office smoking and require buildings to be better ventilated.