When I hired in at GM we had to wear earplugs or muffs for the first 6 hours of work and all overtime. After OSHA checked to see how noisy it was we had to wear earplugs at all times. Going deaf for 2 hours a day was no longer an option. About the only time we didn't have to wear them was in the locker room, cafeteria, and what few enclosed break rooms we had. I'm very familiar with talking over the noise. Standing on one side of a conveyor you had to yell for the person 6 feet away on the other side to hear you. Sometimes you had to lean in to be heard.

"We have the option of wearing ear plugs but I need full hearing to be able to hear all the potential dangers around me." If it's half as noisy as where I worked you definitely have permanent hearing damage. Even wearing earplugs all the time that cut the noise by about 32 dB I got hearing damage. Luckily my hearing loss is almost entirely in very high frequencies that are hard to hear anyway, and not in the range of anyone's voice. Not wearing ear plugs will actually make it harder to hear any potential dangers around you as your hearing gets worse and worse. Once you have a hearing loss like that it's forever.