The Department of Labor today released voluntary ergonomic guidelines for nursing home employers which are weak, incomplete recommendations that lower the bar on protecting workers from preventable injuries. The guidelines question the legitimacy of ergonomic injuries, leave out useful check-lists for employers to assess and improve job safety and move the federal government more than a decade back in making a compelling case to businesses about why ergonomic injuries are a serious safety problem that can be prevented.

There are real life consequences of the Bush administration’s laissez faire approach to injuries. More workers will suffer, more workers will have to quit their jobs and more workers will be burdened by lifelong pain and disability because the administration will not act aggressively.

It’s been more than two years since President George W. Bush signed legislation overturning an ergonomics standard that would have protected workers in a broad range of industries. Since then, another 3.6 million workers have suffered crippling and sometimes career-ending ergonomic injuries with no hope that that federal government will enforce standards that could prevent these injuries.

The Bush administration’s feeble assurance in 2001 that the ergonomic standard would be replaced by a comprehensive approach to preventing injuries was proven utterly meaningless today by the Department of Labor’s questioning of the validity of ergonomic injuries. In 1990, when then-Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole introduced guidelines for the meatpacking industry, she referred to the ergonomic injuries as painful and crippling and one of the nation’s most debilitating across-the-board safety problems. Yet today the Department of Labor refuses to acknowledge the serious impact of ergonomics injuries or the urgent need for action, and instead claims that much is left to be learned.