Many workshops did not stop for the Mid-Autumn Festival. Orders were still due, the shift roster was half its usual size, the veteran hands had gone home for the reunion, and the posts were largely filled by workers who had joined only recently. The lights were the same, the machines were the same — the only thing that had really changed was the people. And when protective equipment is involved, incidents happen nine times out of ten in exactly this situation: too few people, too much urgency, too much haste.

Holiday shifts rarely lack rules. What they lack is a three-minute equipment check before work starts. Fewer people, urgent deadlines and newly posted workers stack on top of one another, and every hazard that is normally absorbed by experience suddenly shows its face. This article gives shift leaders and holiday crews a three-point checklist. Every item is backed by a hard figure in a current national standard. The check takes three minutes; what it prevents may be the worst incident of the year.

Check 1 — Appearance: a scratched lens is as good as no lens

The most common mistake during a holiday rush is treating "it will still do" as "it still works".

Take eye and face protection. GB 14866-2023, General technical specification for eye and face protection, is specific in clause 8.6: apart from the 5 mm zone at the lens edge, no surface defect capable of impairing vision may exist within a circle of 30 mm radius centred on the reference point — bubbles, scratches, cracks, mould spots and water marks all count.

What does that mean in practice? A lens covered in scratches already fails the standard. It will also struggle to hold the 85% minimum luminous transmittance required by clause 7.1. Looking through a scratched lens at a grinding operation, the path of flying particles is distorted and your sense of distance is wrong.

The check is simple: hold the lens up to a light source and turn it. If you see scratches, cracks or mould spots within an area the size of a coin, replace it — no second thoughts. Safety goggles are consumables, not fixed assets.

Check 2 — Service life: some gear expires without ever looking broken

Some equipment fails silently. It looks perfectly fine, yet its protective performance has already dropped to zero.

Respiratory protection first. Holiday maintenance means confined space entry, and GB 18664-2025 draws a hard line at 19.5% oxygen in the working atmosphere: below that figure, filtering respirators are prohibited without exception. And filter cartridges are never changed "once you can smell something" — judging cartridge life by nose is itself a repeatedly flagged bad practice. With thin holiday staffing it matters even more to replace whole cartridges on a fixed cycle rather than opening last month's part-used ones.

Then antistatic footwear. GB 28409-2025 explicitly prohibits adding your own insoles. As the weather turns cold, someone puts a cotton insole in for comfort — and the antistatic performance is void on the spot. Electronics and chemical plants shipping to deadline after the holiday should watch this closely, especially among newly posted workers.

And safety helmets. The new head protection standard makes rejection criteria mandatory: a cracked shell, a loose or detached harness, or use beyond the service life — any one of these means the helmet leaves the job. Do not underestimate the padding ring inside. An aged harness cannot absorb impact at the moment of a knock, and however intact the shell looks, it will not protect the head. However busy the post-holiday period gets, one helmet is not what you are saving; an incident is where the real cost lies.

Check 3 — Fit: don't send relief workers out unprotected

The biggest variable during a holiday is people. Workers covering temporarily, staff lent from other departments, first-day helpers — many of them have no personal kit of their own.

Two things must happen before they start. First, kit them out by task. Article 45 of the Work Safety Law of the People's Republic of China sets out the employee's right to obtain personal protective equipment, and providing it is a statutory duty of the employer that is not discounted because of a holiday. The penalty provision has been there all along: fail to provide PPE that meets national standards, and if something goes wrong, not one share of the liability will be waived.

Second, fit the kit to the individual. Goggles must match the face; where the seal is poor, flying particles come in through the gap. Safety helmets must be tightened to the head — a loose helmet flies off first at the moment of impact. Earplugs are the worst offender: grab a pair at random and the wrong size or insufficient insertion depth halves the rated attenuation. That is exactly what the fit test required by GB 23466-2025 addresses: every worker and every pair of earplugs must be measured for the protection actually achieved in use. Nor should you chase maximum attenuation — workshops also carry forklift reversing alarms and warning signals, and over-attenuation means those warnings go unheard, which creates a bigger problem still. And if borrowed equipment will not clamp or hang properly, it may look worn while leaving the wearer effectively unprotected.

Pitfall 1 — treating "just borrowing" as normal during the holidays

The most common exchange during a holiday goes like this: "Foreman, my goggles are scratched — can I borrow Xiao Li's for tonight?"

The problem is not the borrowing. It is that the borrowing usually lasts three days. For three days he grinds with a lens that does not fit him, particles slip past the gap and into his eye — this kind of incident is never absent from post-holiday statistics. The same logic applies to earplugs passed around and helmets swapped between heads: a hygiene problem and a fit problem at the same time. When equipment is faulty, replacing it is the only correct action. The spare sets kept in the cabinet exist precisely for moments like this.

Action items for shift leaders

1. Add a "three-point gear check" line to the shift handover sheet: appearance, service life, fit — three minutes, signed off.

2. Count the spare cabinet tonight: goggles, filter cartridges and helmets — keep at least one brand-new spare of each.

3. Post a "prohibited list" in the shift room: scratched lenses, expired cartridges, home-made insoles, cracked helmet shells — replace on sight, no authorisation needed.

4. Before relief workers start, issue their equipment and adjust the fit first, then send them to the post. The order cannot be reversed.

Rushing to meet a deadline over a holiday is nothing to be ashamed of. What costs you is the gamble that "nothing happened this time". Who is on shift in your workshop this Mid-Autumn? Who is responsible for the equipment? Tell us how you handle it.

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This article is general safety information. In practice, follow the current text of the applicable standards and your own site safety management rules.