I worked in a marine exhaust shop for five years, with hammering and grinding going on all the time.
I also conducted about a hundred sea trials of our product, each comprising a couple of hours in a closed, hot engineroom with a pretty big Diesel or two working at full power.
I was careful to use the hearing protection provided, and have suffered no noticeable hearing loss.
That said, most ear protection is uncomfortable, especially when you are hot and sweaty, so there is a strong temptation to remove it.
A friend of mine worked in a blow-molding shop, equipped with a huge noisy shredder to immediately recycle parts that weren't quite right. The old timers who worked there didn't like wearing ear protection because it was uncomfortable, and asserted that they got used to the noise after a few months on the job. I.e., they lost some hearing, but were too ignorant to realize what was going on.
On a somewhat related note, I worked in a Ni-Cd battery shop where part of the battery plates were sandblasted, and the workers had gotten out of the habit of wearing the supplied respirators, so they were breathing metal dust that is an alleged carcinogen. I had a long talk with the most belligerent of the bunch, who asserted that if he got sick, the company would pay his hospital bills until he got well. I couldn't get him to understand that if he got sick, the company would indeed pay his medical bills, until he died. So I threatened to fire him on the spot if I ever caught him without a respirator on his face again, and I told him to go talk to his union rep to see how much the union would do to get his job back. ... which was precisely nothing; it was in the contract, and a matter of black letter law, that refusal to wear provided PPE is grounds for dismissal. Whenever I saw him after that, he would wave and point to the respirator on his face. I doubt that management kept up the pressure; they bitched about the cost of the respirator filters.
Back to your concern; the research has been done, and there's plenty of anecdotal evidence to support it.
In the US, a number of government agencies require that appropriate PPE be provided, at no cost to the worker, but enforcement is somewhat less than universal.
If you want to do the world a favor, become a PPE designer and make it more comfortable to wear.
In fairness, I should point out that in addition to chronic hazards like carcinogen exposure and hearing loss, there are probably enough acute hazards to provde a thousand ways to die in any given factory, so you should take all appropriate precautions, use common sense, read up on what you're doing, and especially, pay attention in the workplace, and you'll have a fair chance of getting old and cranky like me, and dying of something other than a workplace hazard.
I should also point out that making a fuss about hazards and stuff like that during an interview will exclude you from the job, unless that is the job.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
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