That will work given your current situation.

Two problems:

1. it won't fix any problems with other programs (like man) that look at the locale to determine the encoding.

2. if someone does set their terminal encoding to utf-8 (or uses another terminal that defaults to utf-8, which the systems local terminals almost certainly do) it will mess up 8-bit "extended ascii" characters (like latin-1, or whatever the system thinks uses by default).

IOW, you're almost certainly better off in the long run if you configure the terminal(s) to use UTF-8. Unless you're 100% sure you're never going to have to read anything but latin-based characters - or perl 6. Then you could just set the systems' default LANG to C instead of hacking around the problem by ignoring the locale.