In this episode, Mark talks with Estella Cisneros, Legal Director of the Agricultural Worker Program at California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc (CLRA). Mark asks four crucial questions about how rural farmworkers are currently impacted between the wildfires raging in the western United States and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why are these farmworkers vulnerable to wildfire smoke? What protections do these workers have available to them? What else is needed to protect these valuable workers from this hazard? Estella oversees the organization’s statewide work with agricultural workers, which includes farmworkers as well as those employed in dairies, packing houses, nurseries and meat and poultry processing operations, such as meat packing plants. She is based in Fresno, CA, where her practice focuses on employment and workplace health and safety matters, including sexual harassment and assault in the workplace.

The daughter of Mexican farmworkers from Planada, California, Estella graduated from Stanford University in 2007 and Yale Law School in 2012. In 2013, she was named one of Forbes Magazine’s “Top 30 Under 30” in Law & Policy and in 2015, featured as one of Huffington Post’s “30 Women Under 30 Changing Food.”

Download today the Five Ways to Protect Farmworkers from Wildfire Smoke.

This episode was first published on October 5, 2020.