Two thousand eye injuries a day. One standard.

The trigger is hazard exposure, not job title: grinding, chipping, sawing, nailing, chemical handling, and welding all create exposures the standard itemizes. Selection follows the hazard — safety glasses with side protection for impact, goggles for chemical splash and fine dust, face shields over primary protection for heavy grinding, and properly shaded filter lenses for radiant energy work. A face shield alone is secondary protection; inspectors look for the safety glasses underneath.

Welding operations get their own tables: §1926.102(b)(1) prescribes minimum filter shade numbers by process and electrode size — shade 10 for typical shielded metal arc welding, up to 14 for heavy carbon arc, with gas welding and torch work stepping down from there. Adjacent workers and helpers exposed to arc flash need protection too.

Most 1926.102 citations are painfully ordinary: safety glasses in the truck instead of on faces during a cutting task, non-rated fashion eyewear treated as protection, missing side shields around flying-particle work, and prescription-wearers with nothing over their street glasses. The standard requires Z87.1-compliant equipment — look for the marking — and requires the employer to ensure use, not merely provide it.

Employers also carry the PPE assessment obligation from the general PPE rules: identify the eye and face hazards per task, select protection accordingly, and train employees on when and what to wear. Where it's feasible to engineer the hazard away — machine guards, screens, ventilation — PPE remains the last layer, not the first.

The welding shade tables are exactly the reference material crews need at the moment of work and never carry. In RegLogic, "what shade for stick welding 5/32?" resolves to the table in seconds — on a phone, offline. Pin the section, note your company's eyewear issue policy beside it, and the toolbox-talk question answers itself.