How do they view modern eye, respiratory and skin protection every welder I’ve seen on an industrial site clad in?
Even if you've got protection on, you still get exposed little by little. If someone is welding next to you on a site, you get exposed. If you have slag, you are breathing vaporized chemicals and heavy metal ions unless you a wearing a closed system breather. Any solvents or fluids tend to be some level of toxic. etc.
Welding is more than just putting rod to metal. You cut things. You grind things. You apply chemicals in preparation. Nobody is dressed in an environmental hazard suit all day--lack of mobility and peripheral vision is its own industrial hazard.
If you're covered in grime at the end of the day, well, all that crap is toxic to some degree.
Why you’d think you can characterize an entire industry based on a few snapshots is not clear to me.
A few more things I’d add to the health risks of welding: the inevitable toxic crap on the hands even just by taking off the protective equipment, or the occasionally extremely uncomfortable body posture that needs to be maintained for hours on end while welding. And there are more extreme welding environments that put almost any job on earth to shame, like hyperbaric welding.
Over years things add up. If office work is hard on the body for too much sitting which is natural and fine is smaller doses, imagine work where even the small exposures are terribly bad.
Source: only welded once in my life but worked for a company that did a lot of it, from the mountain top to the bottom of the sea. All the safety avoids acute issues but the chronic ones will build up.
