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Ergonomic risk assessment (ERA) is commonly used to identify and analyze postures that are detrimental to the health of workers in industrial workplaces, which is vital to prevent work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs). Among the automatic approaches, algorithms based on graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have shown promising results in ERA using skeleton sequence as input. However, previous GCN-based methods still have certain limitations. First, the separated modeling of spatial and temporal information and the manually pre-defined topology of graph may restrict the representation diversity of the networks. Additionally, RNN-based temporal modeling often incurs high computational costs and fails to capture long-range temporal dependencies, thereby reducing flexibility in describing long videos. To overcome these challenges, in this study, we propose an attention-based adaptive spatial–temporal graph convolutional network (AAST-GCN), aiming to achieve effective and efficient action representation for ERA in long video. First, we employ an alternate modeling strategy to effectively capture the spatial–temporal information, and propose an improved adaptive adjacency matrix scheme to learn various coordination and relations of body-joints, thus enhancing the flexibility to model diverse postures. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient multi-scale temporal convolutional network as a replacement for RNN-based algorithms, enabling the network to extract various granularities of temporal features. Moreover, to make the network focuses on more valuable information, we employ a spatial–temporal interaction attention (STIA) module. Finally, the aforementioned modules are aggregated within a multi-task learning framework, with the action segmentation serving as the auxiliary task to further improve the accuracy of ERA. We conducted the ergonomic risk assessment on the UW-IOM and TUM Kitchen datasets using our network. Extensive experiments conducted on the most popular datasets UW-IOM and TUM Kitchen demonstrated that our proposed AAST-GCN outperforms other GCN-based methods. Ablation studies and visualization also prove the effectiveness of the individual sub-modules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]