Defending Health in the Fields: Community Lawyering for Farmworker Safety

Farmworkers across the country face heightened safety risks on the job, from severe injuries to pesticide exposure to extreme heat and wildfire smoke – many of which are exacerbated by climate change. To address this, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) works to enforce state standards for workers’ health and safety, however, critical gaps in both enforcement and workplace inspections mean that many farmworkers are still forced to risk their health and safety on the job.

This is where community organizations come in. During Summer 2025, I had the transformative opportunity to intern at California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. (CRLA, Inc.), a non-profit legal service organization dedicated to serving, engaging with, and representing people in California’s rural communities who have been priced out of private legal representation. As an intern, I helped create a guide and calculator for Cal/OSHA civil penalties. Through this work, I learned how gaps in current labor-related environmental assessments can be addressed to better protect agricultural worker health, and how community-centered lawyering can generate systemic change.

For the guide, I analyzed several sections of Title 8 of the California Code of Regulations to write a step-by-step, 12-page guide to support CRLA, Inc. staff in calculating, evaluating, and understanding the factors used to determine total penalties issued against parties who violate workers’ health and safety rights. Additionally, for the calculator, I developed a user-friendly, all-encompassing Cal/OSHA fine estimator using Excel. In just seconds, staff can easily receive a variety of calculated penalty estimates. To learn what this looked like on the ground, I engaged in field monitoring of vineyards with CRLA, Inc. staff, looking out for any agricultural worksites lacking basic health and safety standards for workers. 

But there was also a need to analyze cases from past years. I carefully looked through hundreds of Cal/OSHA complaints made by CRLA, Inc. between 2017 and 2025 and highlighted complaints about farm labor contractors who violated heat illness and safety requirements, so the Fresno AWJP office could better analyze those citations and strengthen their labor rights’ advocacy. 

As farmworkers face heightening environmental, health, and safety risks, CRLA, Inc. continues to defend workers’ rights to work in healthy and safe conditions. Staff will use these resources, created in collaboration with CRLA, Inc.’s Fresno Agricultural Worker Justice Program (AWJP) team, to ensure that Cal/OSHA appropriately penalizes farm labor contractors and other agricultural employers for workplace violations.

This experience taught me how existing law can both protect workers’ health and safety and create barriers to justice, and how these laws can be adapted to more effectively safeguard workers on the frontlines of climate-driven risks. By working closely with CRLA, Inc. staff, I learned how community-centered lawyering generates individual and systemic change in agricultural labor and environmental justice to promote farmworker health.