The lack of an industry-approved standard, or the decibel limit set by a standard, can determine whether or not you lose your hearing, sleep properly, or can live a life of minimum acoustic stress.
Few legislative bodies will enact regulatory legislation without the existence of an officially approved reference standard. Industry, by dominating the standard-setting process, can prevent or delay the adoption of standards, or can see to it that any standards that are adopted are virtually meaningless.
There are today no state laws limiting occupational noise exposure. Three states—California, Washington, and Oregon—have safety orders that offer very little protection. The permitted noise levels are too high; emphasis is on the use of ear protectors, and not on engineering methods for noise reduction.
More typical is the lack of any limitation. The Pennsylvania Department of Health in 1966 could report that though it had twenty years of experience with industrial noise surveys, it had not succeeded in getting legislation which would impose standards on industry. All it could do was moralize with the factory operators.
Free men are treated no worse than convicts. Workers in the Federal prison factories—Leavenworth's wooden furniture shops, the Terre Haute woolen textile mills, and the Lewisburg metal shops—are deafened by the noisy workshops. In a 24-month comparison study of various types of Federal prison workshops, the above groups experienced the greatest loss of hearing among the prisoners tested.