WASHINGTON (PAI) - Not only will the Bush Administration not allow OSHA to regulate ergonomic injuries - it won't even count them.

In a June 30 decision in the Federal Register, OSHA said a line for musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) on its worker illness and injury reports would be eliminated for good. MSDs are the official name for ergonomic injuries. The decision means employers now will not have to list them for OSHA.

OSHA's decision angered the AFL-CIO, which campaigned long and hard for rules to cut the number of ergonomic injuries. Such injuries sideline some 600,000 workers per year for varying lengths of time from their jobs.

Recalling that the Bush administration backed big business' successful effort in 2001 to get Congress to repeal OSHA's comprehensive ergo rule formed under the Clinton Administration, federation President John J. Sweeney said: "Now, again at industry's behest, the administration eliminated the very information that would help employers and workers identify MSDs and hazardous conditions.

"Just because the government is not going to require employers to track these injuries, and just because the government is not going to enforce a safety standard, doesn't mean that workers will stop becoming ill or permanently disabled on the job. Cutting off all information about MSDs exposes the Bush administration's approach as meaningless," Sweeney added.

OSHA said the process of counting ergonomic injuries doesn't tell researchers how those injuries happened, and that existing injury case reports are sufficient to do that.