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When I was in High School, I had a job in a non-union factory called "Baker Box". I was a "Press Monkey". I sat on the floor in back of a huge hydraulic press that was stamping out metal corners for wooden milk bottle crates and caught the pieces as they came out and stacked them into trays.
The noise was thunderous. There were no OSHA safety rules back then and nobody though of ear plugs, besides the regular press operators were already deaf anyway. After the first minute I couldn't hear anything anymore. After about ten minutes my eyes would start to water and I would loose orientation and become "punch press drunk".
I would work for an hour and get a five minute break. I couldn't leave my spot under the press during the break because I was too disoriented to walk and was temporarily deaf. When the press operator came back from his smoke break we would start up again for another hour.
Luckily, we only needed so many corners stamped out so I only had to be Press Monkey a couple of times a month. The rest of the time I would get to be a "Dipper".
This involved plunging wooden boxes into a vat of lacquer and handing them to another kid who would hang them on a clothesline affair to drain and dry. There were ventilation fans in the dipping room, but they didn't work. The fumes soon overtook us and we worked stoned out of our minds.
We would clean up at a 55 gal drum of solvent with a hand pump on it and since we were high from the fumes, we had great sport splashing the solvent all over us. Then we would go to the bathroom for a smoke break.
Of course the worst happened and one of the guys caught fire. He survived, but got a different job. That didn't change a thing and we continued to dip boxes, breath toxic fumes, and cover ourselves in toxic and flammable solvent.
Then there was the sawdust pit. This was a large bin in the basement that had chutes from the saws on the floors above that brought sawdust down. I had to go in and shovel the sawdust into burlap sacks while the saws were running and sawdust was pouring down on me. It was so thick that I could hardly see or breathe and the sawdust would stick all over my sweaty body and my skin would constantly itch and burn.
I never heard of a respirator or face mask, but I had seen sand storms in the movies so I would wet my handkerchief and tie it over my face so I could breathe.
I made 75 cents an hour.
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