David Cremins

The Project

David’s (he/him/his) project with California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. (CRLA) will reduce the impacts of the climate crisis on agricultural workers in California’s Central Valley by enforcing workplace health and safety laws regulating heat exposure and other environmental stressors.

Fellowship Plans

Farmworkers in California often lack recourse to justice when their rights are violated on the job, as there are few free and accessible legal service providers, and government enforcement agencies often lack the resources to investigate in rural areas. As a result, hundreds of thousands of workers suffer from lack of water and shade, exposure to wildfire smoke and pesticides, and injuries and illness from overwork in heat, and may be retaliated against when seeking to exercise their rights to ameliorate such environmental conditions. The time is ripe, therefore, to bring climate justice to the workplace, in California and beyond. David will collaborate with CRLA lawyers and community workers, allied organizations, and state agencies over the course of his Fellowship to deliver Know-Your-Rights trainings about existing legal protections; bring administrative complaints and litigation to improve climate-related health and safety conditions throughout the Central Valley; and participate in working groups and rule-making processes around the state and country to scale the lessons learned in the breadbasket of the world’s fifth-largest economy.

Media