Most workshop safety rules are uncontroversial. Wear eye protection. Do not wear gloves near a rotating spindle. Tie your hair back.
A few generate genuine argument, usually from experienced makers who have worked without them for years. These are the ones worth explaining rather than simply enforcing.
**No working alone on machinery**
The objection is reasonable: experienced people work alone in their own workshops constantly. But our machines are shared, which means the last person to use them may have left something subtly wrong, and you may not know the machine as well as you think.
More bluntly: the injuries that kill people in workshops are the ones where nobody was there to stop the bleeding. The rule is not about competence.
**Induction on every machine, even if you have used one before**
The pushback here is fair — a professional welder should not need to be taught to weld. The induction is not teaching you the craft. It is teaching you *this* machine: where its isolator is, how its extraction works, what its known faults are, and where the fire blanket is kept. It takes twenty minutes.
**Report your own near-misses**
The hardest rule to enforce, because it asks people to admit mistakes. We have made it explicitly consequence-free: reporting a near-miss never results in a sanction. What we want is the information. A machine that nearly hurt someone will eventually hurt someone.
**No headphones on the workshop floor**
Unpopular, and we hold it anyway. A great deal of workshop safety is auditory — a change in motor pitch, a bearing starting to fail, someone shouting. If you cannot hear the room, you are relying entirely on vision in an environment where things approach from outside your field of view.
**Why we explain rather than decree**
Rules people understand get followed when nobody is watching. Rules imposed without reason get followed only while supervised, which is precisely when they matter least.