Extreme weather as an occupational hazard: Structural vulnerability among multilingual immigrant workers

Le résumé fourni par la source

Nearly 45 million people speak Spanish at home in the United States, yet multilingual immigrant workers within this community remain underrepresented in disaster science research despite bearing high vulnerability to extreme weather hazards. We conducted seven focus groups with 29 Spanish-speaking immigrant workers in Wichita and Garden City, Kansas, two cities with frequent extreme weather exposure and large bilingual populations. Phronetic iterative qualitative analysis revealed four compounding constraints on protective action during extreme weather events: (1) limited multilingual information and knowledge gaps that delayed protective decision-making, (2) unclear and inconsistently enforced workplace emergency preparedness plans that shifted safety responsibility onto individual workers, (3) workplace power imbalances and fear of retaliation that discouraged protective action even when risks were recognized, and (4) constraints beyond the worksite, including commuting distance and caregiving obligations, that limited action even where employers permitted departure. Participants also identified strategies to advance workplace safety, including institutionalizing emergency preparedness structures, standardizing multilingual hazard communication, and investing in weather-resilient infrastructure. These findings reframe extreme weather vulnerability among multilingual immigrant workers as an occupational safety problem, one that institutions, employers, and policymakers are better positioned to solve than the workers bearing its consequences.

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