There's not potential life-altering side effects from wearing PPE or using plumbing, and those things are outside the body not injected into it.
Seems like a pretty easy distinction to me.
Seems like a pretty easy distinction to me.
And in construction if you refuse PPE your fired
However, the kind of people who do safety for unreasonable employers (usually process driven BigCos, mines and shipyards are good examples) and the kinds of people who's only exposure to industrial environments is the mandatory safety training they took once upon a time for their internship tend to dominate internet discussions about PPE and safety. This results in some real gems of insanity.
Safety culture is super hard to build, taking years of collaboration between management, workers, and unions if applicable. Every group wants nothing more than for the employees to go home the same way they went to work.
Any one time you do a task with less than required PPE, probably nothing will happen. But over the course of a career, those "this one time" instances add up and eventually will cause an injury or death.
The largest demographic experiencing heat issues in the shipyard are younger than 40.
Sure, there can and will always be one-in-a-million outliers. But that's true about anything, including wearing a helmet.