Your equipment operator doesn't hear the backup alarm anymore. Your welder says "What?" three times before he understands what you're asking. Your foreman has the radio cranked so loud in his truck that you can hear it from across the parking lot.
You probably think that's just what happens when you work in construction or manufacturing for 20 years. Everybody's hearing gets worse, right?
Wrong.
Occupational hearing loss isn't an inevitable part of aging. It's an injury. And like every other workplace injury, it's preventable, but only if you actually do something about it before the damage is done.
Right now, 22 million American workers are exposed to noise levels high enough to cause permanent hearing loss. In construction, more than half your crew is walking around with damaged hearing already. And here's the part that should make every safety manager lose sleep: 53% of workers who are exposed to hazardous noise don't wear hearing protection.
That's not a training problem. That's not a compliance problem. That's a "we're about to have a very expensive problem" problem.
October is National Protect Your Hearing Month, and if your company doesn't have a real hearing conservation program (not just a box of earplugs in the supply closet) this is your wake-up call.
Let us put this in perspective.
About 12% of all workers in America have hearing difficulty. That's 1 in 8 people. Among those with hearing problems, 1 in 4 got them from their job.
In construction specifically? Fourteen percent of your workforce has hearing difficulty right now. Seven percent have tinnitus, that constant ringing or buzzing in your ears that never stops, not when you're trying to sleep, not when you're trying to have a conversation with your family, never.
But here's the number that should scare you: 51% of construction workers have been exposed to hazardous noise. Half your crew. And remember, only 48% of them are actually wearing hearing protection.
Now let's talk about manufacturing. Eighteen percent of manufacturing workers have hearing difficulty. Nearly one in five. Forty-six percent have been exposed to hazardous noise. And even though the risks are obvious, 28% of noise-exposed manufacturing workers still don't wear protection.
You want to know what happens when you ignore this for 20 or 30 years? Fifty-eight percent of construction workers end up with measurable hearing loss. That's not "a little trouble hearing at restaurants." That's life-changing, career-affecting, relationship-damaging hearing loss.
Among welders, it's 77%. Three out of four welders who've been in the trade for two decades have significant hearing impairment.
And every single case was preventable.
Here's what most people don't understand about noise-induced hearing loss: it's not about one really loud explosion or incident. It's about eight hours a day, five days a week, year after year, of exposure to sounds that seem totally normal to you.
NIOSH (the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health)says anything at or above 85 decibels over an 8-hour shift is hazardous. That's the threshold where your hearing starts taking permanent damage.
You know what 85 decibels sounds like? A jackhammer 50 feet away. Heavy traffic. A food blender.
Now think about what your crew is actually exposed to:
And here's the thing about decibels, they're measured on a logarithmic scale, which means small increases equal massive jumps in danger. NIOSH uses what's called a "3 dBA exchange rate." Every time the noise increases by 3 decibels, you can only safely be exposed for half as long.
So while you might be okay at 85 dBA for 8 hours, at 88 dBA you should only be exposed for 4 hours. At 91 dBA, it's 2 hours. At 100 dBA (which is not uncommon on construction sites) NIOSH recommends less than 15 minutes of exposure per day.
Your guys are out there for 8, 10, sometimes 12-hour shifts.
Now do the math.
Most safety managers focus exclusively on the noise levels, which makes sense. That's the obvious hazard. But there's another threat that almost nobody talks about: ototoxic chemicals.
Ototoxic means "toxic to the ear." These are chemicals that can damage your hearing even without noise exposure. And when you combine ototoxic chemical exposure with high noise levels, the damage is worse than either one would cause alone.
What chemicals are we talking about? The ones you're using every day:
If your workers are exposed to both high noise and these chemicals (which is extremely common in both construction and manufacturing) hearing protection alone isn't enough. You need exposure monitoring, you need proper ventilation, and you need to understand the combined risk.
Most companies have no idea this is even an issue.
Statistics are one thing. Let us tell you what hearing loss actually does to someone's life.
First, there's the safety issue. When you can't hear backup alarms, warning shouts, approaching vehicles, or equipment problems, you're a danger to yourself and everyone around you. Hearing loss is directly linked to increased workplace injuries.
Then there's the job itself. Workers with hearing loss struggle to communicate with their teams. They miss instructions. They have trouble on phone calls, in meetings, in any situation with background noise. It's exhausting trying to keep up when you can only catch half of what people are saying.
The economic impact is brutal. People with hearing loss make about 25% less than their peers with normal hearing, $23,481 versus $31,272 average annual wage. If you have severe hearing loss, your unemployment rate is double the national average. Double.
And it destroys relationships. You stop going to family gatherings because you can't follow conversations. Your spouse gets frustrated repeating everything three times. Your kids give up trying to talk to you. You withdraw because it's just easier than constantly asking "What? What did you say?"
Oh, and remember that tinnitus we mentioned, the constant ringing? There's no cure. It's with you forever. Some people describe it as a tea kettle that never stops whistling. Others say it's like being at a concert 24/7. It drives people to desperation.
All of this is permanent. Your hearing doesn't heal. Those tiny hair cells in your inner ear that convert sound waves into signals your brain can understand? Once they're damaged, they're done. There's no surgery, no medication, no physical therapy that brings them back.
Let's talk about what this costs your business, because we know that's what gets leadership's attention.
Employers pay $242 million per year in workers' compensation claims for hearing loss. Construction has the highest workers' comp costs for hearing loss of any industry.
But that's just the direct cost. What about:
In 2007, 82% of occupational hearing loss cases were in manufacturing. It's the most commonly recorded occupational illness in that sector- 17,700 cases out of 59,100 total recordable illnesses. That's 1 in 9.
And these are just the cases severe enough to be OSHA-recordable. For every case that gets officially recorded, there are dozens more workers with measurable hearing damage that hasn't reached "recordable" levels yet.
Here's the real kicker: every dollar you spend on hearing conservation saves you money on the back end. Prevention programs have clear ROI. Hearing protection is cheap. Audiometric testing is cheap. Training is cheap.
Lifetime workers' comp claims, lost productivity, and turnover? Not cheap.
October being National Protect Your Hearing Month doesn't mean you hand out earplugs and call it done.
Real protection, the kind that actually prevents hearing loss and keeps you compliant, means having four things in place:
1. Know Your Noise Levels
You can't protect your workers if you don't know what they're exposed to. You need actual noise monitoring. Not guessing, not assuming. Personal dosimetry for workers who move between different noise environments throughout the day. Documentation of what equipment produces what noise levels. Identification of high-noise areas.
If you haven't measured the noise levels in your workplace in the last 12 months, you're flying blind.
2. Engineering and Administrative Controls First
OSHA is clear about this: hearing protection devices are the last line of defense, not the first. Before you rely on PPE, you're supposed to eliminate or reduce noise at the source.
Can you use quieter equipment? Can you isolate noisy operations? Can you rotate workers to limit individual exposure times? Can you install barriers or enclosures?
We know, engineering controls are expensive, and administrative controls are complicated. That's why most companies skip straight to "just wear earplugs." But if someone gets hurt and OSHA comes calling, they're going to ask what you did besides hand out PPE.
3. The Right Protection, Properly Used
Not all hearing protection is created equal. Foam earplugs, moldable plugs, banded earplugs, earmuffs, they all have different Noise Reduction Ratings (NRR) and work better in different situations.
More importantly, they only work if they're inserted correctly. Do your workers know how to properly insert foam earplugs? Because most people don't, and incorrectly inserted plugs provide almost no protection.
You need to provide options so people can find what actually fits and what they'll actually wear. And you need to train them, really train them (not just show a video once) on correct usage.
4. Audiometric Testing
This is the part most construction companies skip because OSHA doesn't require it for construction workers.
Baseline hearing tests establish what your workers' hearing is like when they start. Annual testing catches problems early, before they become severe. And critically, proper documentation protects you when someone files a workers' comp claim years after they leave your company.
Without baseline audiograms and annual monitoring, you have no way to prove their hearing loss didn't happen on your watch.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: you probably already have hearing protection available. You've probably done training. And your workers still aren't wearing it consistently.
Why?
Because it's uncomfortable. Because it's hard to hear instructions and warnings. Because it feels isolating when everyone else is shouting without it. Because it's one more thing to remember. Because management doesn't enforce it. Because the consequences seem distant and abstract.
The solution isn't yelling at people or writing them up (though enforcement matters). The solution is making protection the default, the easy choice, the normal thing everyone does.
That means:
And yeah, it means enforcing consequences when people repeatedly refuse. Because one person's choice to skip hearing protection can influence a whole crew.
Look, we get it. You're busy. You've got projects to deliver, crews to manage, equipment to maintain, and about fifteen other safety initiatives competing for attention and budget.
But here's why October matters: it gives you a reason to prioritize this. A deadline. A campaign you can rally around.
Use this month to:
Week 1: Assess where you stand
Week 2: Get leadership buy-in
Week 3: Start fixing the critical gaps
Week 4: Train and communicate
You don't have to have everything perfect by November 1st. But you should have a plan, you should have started measuring, and you should have stopped pretending that a box of foam earplugs equals a hearing conservation program.
Here's what we want you to understand: unlike a lot of workplace injuries, hearing loss is permanent and progressive.
Cut your hand, you heal. Break your leg, it mends. Breathe in too much dust, there are treatments. But damage the hair cells in your inner ear? They're gone forever.
Every single day your workers go without adequate protection, they're losing more hearing. It's cumulative. It's irreversible. And by the time they notice it's a problem, by the time they're asking people to repeat themselves, turning up the TV, struggling in restaurants, the damage is already severe.
You can't fix it after the fact. You can only prevent it before it happens.
That's why this month matters. That's why these statistics should bother you. That's why "we've always done it this way" isn't good enough.
Your workers trust you to keep them safe. Not just safe from the obvious hazards, the fall risks (the caught-in hazards, the struck-by incidents, etc.)but also from the invisible injuries that creep up over 20 years and steal their quality of life.
Hearing loss doesn't get the same attention as a construction fatality. It doesn't make headlines. But ask someone who's been living with severe hearing loss and tinnitus for a decade whether it's destroyed their life.
If you're reading this and realizing your hearing conservation program is basically non-existent, don't panic. Start here:
Download our free Workplace Hearing Conservation Preparedness Checklist. It's one page, 30 questions, and it'll tell you exactly where you stand.
Get your noise levels measured. You can't protect people from a hazard you haven't quantified. Period.
Set up baseline audiometric testing for your noise-exposed workers. Even if OSHA doesn't require it for construction, you need it for documentation and early detection.
Stop relying exclusively on hearing protection devices. Figure out where you can reduce noise at the source or limit exposure time.
Make this somebody's job. Hearing conservation programs don't run themselves. Assign responsibility, create accountability, and give that person the authority and budget to actually do something.
And if you're looking at this and thinking "I have no idea where to start" or "I don't have the internal expertise to build this program" that's exactly what occupational health providers like us exist for. You don't have to figure this out alone
Twenty-two million American workers are being exposed to noise levels that will cause permanent hearing loss if nothing changes.
Fifty-eight percent of construction workers already have measurable hearing damage. Nearly a fifth of manufacturing workers have hearing difficulty.
It's costing employers $242 million a year in workers' comp, and that's before you count the productivity losses, turnover, and quality of life impacts.
And 53% of the people exposed to this hazard aren't wearing protection.
That's not acceptable. It's not sustainable. And it's completely preventable.
October is National Protect Your Hearing Month. Use it. Make this the month you stop pretending earplugs are enough and start building a real hearing conservation program.
Your workers are depending on you. Their families are depending on you. And honestly, your bottom line is depending on you.
Don't wait until someone can't hear their grandkids to decide this mattered.
Download Your FREE Workplace Hearing Conservation Preparedness Checklist
One page. 30 questions. Find out where your program stands.
