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The U.S. Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration unveiled a plan Friday to develop voluntary guidelines by this fall to reduce ergonomics injuries.

Trucking and other industries have been waiting for OSHA to formally say whether it would offer guidelines or impose government requirements.

OSHA said it expected to start releasing guidelines for selected industries this year, and would encourage others to develop their own additional guidelines.

Ergonomics deals with restructuring the workplace environment to prevent musculoskeletal injuries related to the physical actions required to perform a job.

Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said the plan would be "a major improvement over the rejected old rule because it will prevent ergonomics injuries before they occur, and reach a much larger number of at-risk workers."

OSHA Administrator John Henshaw said his agency will develop the guidelines to curb and prevent the musculoskeletal injuries. It also will conduct more training and target its enforcement efforts against employers who are not safety-conscious by using a general duty clause.

The plan comes 13 months after the administration nullified previous rules that were brought out under the Clinton administration.

Those were intended to cover more than 100 million workers at six million job sites, but drew criticism for a number of reasons.

Business groups said they were hard to understand and costly to implement, and warned that some jobs could be replaced by automation.

Organized labor supported the Clinton-era regulations.

a statement from ATA.