Asian Labor Futures Podcast

About Asian Labor Futures Podcast

Asian Labor Futures is about reimagining labor and labor's power and redefining what the future of work mean from the standpoint of workers themselves. It is grounded in what I call “other-than-expert” knowledge. asianlaborfutures.substack.com (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Kriangsak T., PhD

Category

news · science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

31 Jan 2026

Latest episode

16 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

18 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   16 Oct 2026

   The Labor of Commoning Art

   (A section of Rice Riot Poster by the Japanese A3BC (https://a3bcollective.org/) collective) Dear friends, In my last post, I wrote about how the Indonesian artist collective ruangrupa uses practices of lumbung (a shared rice barn model) to rethink economic futures and pool resources. If collectives offer a viable alternative to our culture of hyper-individualism, we need to understand what makes them survive or even thrive. This question is important because many already act as indispensable social infrastructure in the cultural space. This infrastructure is an intentional, relational practice for collectively managing resources, labor, and care. In this post, I want to think out loud while building a framework for collective care, drawing on Asian anti-colonial traditions to understand the significance of these spaces. Thanks for reading Asian Labor Futures! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. My Search for Asian Conceptual Frames Writing from an Asian perspective, I want to develop Asian frameworks grounded in our own genealogies. When we trace anti-colonial art movements across the region, we see a striking thread running through them. Long before today’s debates on socially engaged art, practitioners were already questioning the Western cult of the individual genius. In 1930s, S. Sudjojono, considered “father of Indonesian modernism,” rejected colonial exoticism by demanding art that reflected the unvarnished "visible soul" (Jiwa Ketok) of the people (for more on this, see Artists and the People (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo156866475.html)). Later, South Korea’s Minjung movement took art out of the gallery into communal outdoor theater (madang-geuk), while Japan’s Mingei folk craft movement elevated the beauty of anonymous, cooperative labor (mumei). Rather than forming a single, uniform Asian concept, these localized responses exposed the limits of Western universalism, offering rich foundations for how we understand local initiatives in commoning* art today. *The authors of Commoning Art: Activating Potential of Commons in Art distinguish Commoning Art or transforming the inner mechanics of art-making (how we divide labor, make decisions, handle friction, and care for one another) from Art for the Commons and Art as the Commons. While Art for the Commons refers to art that raises awareness about public or political issues, Art as the Commons views creative expression as a shared heritage belonging to everyone, rather than private property behind copyright or paywalls. Mapping Asian Thought onto European Concepts of Care To think through this, I found curator iLiana Fokianaki’s concept of the “Collective of Care (https://mediathek.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/gropius-bau/journal/the-collective-of-care-responsibility-pleasure-cure-1)” incredibly useful. She breaks care down into three dimensions: responsibility, pleasure, and cure. When we map our own traditions onto these ideas, the abstract concept of solidarity suddenly becomes a set of concrete, social practices. Care as Responsibility and Muality Take responsibility, for instance. In a collective, this means the invisible, daily upkeep of managing spaces and mediating conflicts. In our shared traditions, we might recognize this as gotong royong (Indonesian mutuality) or dure (Korean shared collective labor). But through my background in labor research, I’ve learned that we have to be careful not to romanticize these traditions. This is reproductive labor, and without intentional boundaries, the heavy lifting of care work often defaults to the same few marginalized members. Without intentional protocols, maintenance work defaults onto the same few marginalized members. When that happens, our anti-colonial ideals turn into internal self-exploitation. It shows why Commoning Art (the hard labor of caring for one another daily) is so much tougher than simply making Art for the Commons (raising awareness about solidarity)." Care as Collective Joy and Solidarity Then there is the dimension of pleasure and collective joy. Viewing Art as the Commons reminds us that culture is a shared heritage, and keeping a collective alive requires reclaiming trust and friendship. We see this in local practices like nongkrong in Indonesia or lepak in Malaysia: the simple act of hanging out together without an agenda or productivity target. In a capitalist system that turns every interaction into transactions, simply occupying space together is a radical act. It builds the deep interpersonal trust needed to weather crises down the road. Care as Cure Finally, there is the dimension of repair and healing, which is ultimately about a social safety net and mutual aid. For independent cultural workers in Asia, formal state support is virtually non-existent. Historically, workers absorbed economic shocks through solidarity guilds like the Indonesian sarikat or traditional Korean kye/gae mutual aid pools. Today, commoning art means tackling economic precarity directly. When a collective member falls ill or faces a financial crisis, the collective itself has to function as that self-managed emergency responder. Exploring this has made me reflect on the distance between theory and practice. In your own work or community practice, where do you see the biggest gap between talking about solidarity (Art for the Commons) and practicing it daily (Commoning Art)? And when you map your own collective practices onto these Asian thoughts and values, which dynamic feels most energized and which feels most neglected? In solidarity, Kiang This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit asianlaborfutures.substack.com (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   2 Oct 2026

   Artists Co-creating Economic Futures Through Collectivity

   (picture credit: lumbunggallery.artists.net) Dear friends, I’ve spent years writing about solidarity, movement building, and collective power within labor groups. However, my journey into the world of art labor is much more recent. Coming from a labor background, looking at the art world raises a lot of fascinating and frankly, troubling questions. In observing the artists around me, I keep noticing patterns of precarity and self-exploitation that feel both unique and oddly familiar. In this post, I want to explore these questions and look at how Southeast Asian artists and their collectives are building economic futures through their creative work. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Paradox of Art Labor How did society come to treat art as a passionate calling rather than real work? In her analysis of artistic labor (https://reshape.network/article/wages-for-and-against-art-work-on-economy-autonomy-and-the-future-of-artistic-labour), scholar Katja Praznik examines how the “mythification of creativity” shapes social relations in the arts. By treating artistic labor as “non-labor” and detaching it from the broader economy, society systematically severs art-making from fair compensation. Praznik calls this the “paradox of art.” It’s an ideological framework that functions as a powerful tool for labor discipline and control. Because creative production is framed as its own reward, its physical, mental, and material costs are shifted entirely onto the individual artist. Praznik argues that the ideal of “artistic autonomy” operates much like unpaid domestic or reproductive labor: it redefines work as a calling or pure self-expression, enabling institutions and capital to extract free or underpaid labor under the guise of passion. Consequently, the daily labor that actually sustains art-making including administration, care work, and the gigs needed to pay the bills is rendered invisible, treated as secondary to the “pure” act of creation. Blame the System, Not the People This made me curious about how we can critique the system without blaming individual artists just trying to survive. Here, the late artist and scholar Marina Vishmidt’s concept of infrastructural critique (https://www.versobooks.com/products/3413-infrastructural-critique?srsltid=AfmBOoqJhbw7HPzK8VvlQmXXt416yp_XJ-MIF6FieiZ6WCJI0uSbXH9Z) offers a helpful lens. Vishmidt urges us to investigate the underlying financial, legal, and operational infrastructures that produce value under speculative market. Infrastructural critique means looking past the facade of art to examine the business behind it. We can understand what happens by analyzing art through the mechanics of investment, private property rights, logistics, and uncompensated work. What does this look like in practice? As artist Sharon Chin observed in her essay on “when everyone does everything” in Narratives in Malaysian Art (““Infrastructure,” Vol. 3 (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M3rJfkX52K7SfB5gB9irKB2LptDxlA6l/view)), artists often occupy various positions: curators, writers, administrators, and beyond, due to systemic under-professionalization. Rather than questioning why artists take on so many roles without proper support or compensation, the art world often romanticizes this through a rosy lens, framing artists wearing many hats as “transdisciplinary.” Other contributors in the same volume highlighted how institutions prioritize immediate outcomes (e.g. grand venues, high-profile launches) over longer term needs (e.g. fair wages, administrative support). This dynamic is compounded by bureaucracy, delayed payment cycles, and an absence of safety nets that force practitioners to personally front production costs. As a labor researcher, I know that precedents for collective organizing exist everywhere. How might artists move beyond critique toward building alternative infrastructures grounded in collectivism? Practicing Collectivity and Commoning Across Southeast Asia and its diasporas, independent collectives offer some models, demonstrating how communities can shift from individual competition and survival to collective solidarity. Through mutual aid and resource commoning, grassroots initiatives establish funds by pooling proceeds from shared exhibitions and projects, creating safety nets for artists facing health or financial crises. What I find particularly inspiring is how these community-grounded initiatives intentionally root themselves in working-class neighborhoods or industrial centers, embedding creative work within underserved communities and cultivating shared public spaces entirely outside capitalist logic. A prominent global expression of this approach is the Jakarta-based Gudskul ecosystem and ruangrupa (https://on-curating.org/issue-54-reader/the-history-of-conscious-collectivity-behind-ruangrupa.html) collective. When ruangrupa introduced the Indonesian agrarian practice of lumbung (referred to a communal rice barn) as the core framework for documenta fifteen (http://thirdtext.org/deml-documenta15) in 2022, they raised a crucial question: can an international exhibition function as a site of resource redistribution rather than extraction? By pooling institutional budgets into shared pots through lumbung assemblies, participating collectives redirected capital toward sustaining infrastructure, albeit temporarily, among collectives mostly from the Global South. This experiment was merely the first step. Learn more about the ongoing journey of lumbung here (https://on-curating.org/issue-54-reader/documenta-fifteens-lumbung-the-bumpy-road-on-the-third-way-fragmentary-thoughts-on-the-threats-and-troubles-of-commons-and-commoning-in-contemporary-art-and-knowledge-production.html) and here (https://institution.tv/?day=2&lang=en). It leaves me wondering what else traditional labor movements and art collectives can learn from one another as we build alternative spaces together. This essay marks the beginning of my ongoing conversations with collectives of art and creative labor in Asia. Until next times, Kiang Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   15 Sept 2026

   Reclaiming Cultural Work

   (Picture: Sunagawa #5 by Nakamura Hiroshi) Dear friends, It has been almost two months since my last post! Summer was largely consumed by full-time parenting. Raising kids within a nuclear family in the US, where childcare support is mainly available as a commodity, makes daily life feel like an endless juggling act. Yet, amid the everyday chaos, several threads of thought began to weave together. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been immersed in a research project that unexpectedly reconnected me with a long-dormant passion for art. This is new territory for me and very much a work in progress. Starting with this edition, I am launching a new series exploring art labor, future-making, and collectivity. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Rethinking Art in Labor Advocacy: Beyond Tools When labor activists engage with art, we often fall into a predictable trap. We treat creative work as a PR tactic to “raise awareness.” But if art is ever going to serve as a genuine force for our liberation, we need to fundamentally rethink what art is, who artists are, and how creative or art labor is sustained. To build a truly transformative cultural politics, our movement must confront three main shifts. First, we must look beyond functional art. In traditional advocacy, “using art” usually means designing campaign flyers, capturing photos of daily struggle, or producing documentary films about workers. While displaying these works in gallery spaces is commendable, it remains deeply limiting. Documenting systemic harm is essential, but this approach risks reducing art to a mirror of suffering. It turns working-class struggle into a passive spectacle for middle-class empathy, asking audiences to sympathize rather than organize. While art can raise awareness, its true strength lies in building power and imagining alternative worlds. Movement art should enable workers to process shared grief, forge collective identity, and celebrate shared memory. Art Making as Cultural Production: Historical Lessons from Japan and Korea Second, art cannot build counter-power so long as artists view themselves as isolated, bourgeois creators. Art becomes transformative only when artists recognize themselves for what they truly are: cultural workers and producers. Twentieth-century Asian history offers a powerful precedent. Two pivotal moments from Japan and South Korea show what happens when artists align their craft with the broader working class. In early postwar Japan (1950s), as society grappled with rapid economic development and American militarization, writing circles proliferated while visual artists engaged directly with coal mining communities and anti-base struggles. This gave rise to reportage art (https://cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501715044/art-and-engagement-in-early-postwar-japan/#bookTabs=1), a movement where artists created raw, social-realist works directly from the frontlines of social conflict. The Sunagawa Struggle (1955-1957) against US base expansion (captured vividly in Nakamura Hiroshi's Sunagawa #5) mobilized widespread artistic and civic participation, turning resistance into vibrant sphere of collective cultural production. (Picture: Hong Sung-dam’s May Print: Utopia, 1984) South Korea’s Minjung Movement of the 1970s and 1980s provides a parallel moment. Confronting dictatorial repression and strict censorship, the Minjung Misul (People’s Art) movement, a loose network of individuals, art collectives and organizations championed diverse aesthetic approaches aimed at democratizing society and decolonizing consciousness. It was especially transformative in its “art of the site (hyonjang misul 현장 미술)”: performance-oriented, activist art produced at protest sites and political gatherings. As Art historian Sohl Lee (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-minjung-art-movement)notes, this "site-contingent" art created a dynamic interplay between art objects and participating subjects, turning onlookers into active political agents. By challenging the isolated, elite nature of the art industry, these historical collectives opened creative practice directly to the public. They proved that when we combine democratic self-organization with popular activism, art ceases to be a luxury commodity and becomes an engine for collective agency. In Defense of Art Labor When we treat cultural production as an exclusive, elite profession, we shrink the imaginative horizon of our movements. A transformative politics requires blurring the line between artist and non-artist, recognizing creative practice as a collective capacity. Yet if art is the emotional infrastructure of social movements—the very engine of “future-making”—it cannot be built on exploited labor. Creative work is real work. It demands fair compensation, protection, and collective bargaining. That protection won’t come from the commercial art world. It will happen only when cultural workers are organized directly within the labor movement. When organized labor defends, integrates, and sustains creative producers, art becomes what it was always meant to be: a shared engine for collective power. Until next time, Kiang Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

4. 

   31 Jul 2026

   The Unglamorous Labor of Movement Building

   (Photo by Shwetha Shankar (https://unsplash.com/@shwetha?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/aerial-photography-of-flock-of-white-flying-bird-9Q7PqDxCZeQ?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)) Dear friends, July has been one of the most eventful months of the year. I travelled to Southeast Asia to attend a partner-led writing retreat before joining my colleagues in Bangkok to host the 2nd Regional Networking Conference, bringing together platform worker organizations and civil society from across Asia. Now back home in the US, I’m taking time to process the connections, exchanges, and insights from these two gatherings. Having worked in relative isolation for the past two years, this was a rare opportunity to meet and reconnect with peers across Asia. In this piece, reflecting on this whirlwind trip, I share insights from our discussions on why an infrastructure of trust-building is essential to creating sustainable networks. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Structure and Infrastructure It might sound cliché to say that interpersonal relationships are the foundation of movement-building. Yet mistrust and conflict remain ones of the most common forces tearing collectives apart. Conflict is like an elephant in the room that we rarely address until it is too late. This is where the distinction between structure and infrastructure becomes useful. Organizational structure is the architecture of what we do together. Too often, we build rigid structures that assume smooth sailing, leaving them brittle and prone to snapping when crisis arises. We can, and should, design structures that are explicitly built to handle crisis and tension, such as rotating decision-making bodies and transparent governance rules. However, even the most conflict-responsive structure will fall apart without the infrastructure beneath it. Infrastructure is the underlying system that enables organizations to communicate with and lean on one another. Importantly, movement infrastructure is never just one thing: it spans both the formal and the informal, the tangible and the intangible. The Layers of Movement Infrastructure For me, it was sharing meals with organizers and unwinding after long conference days that created the room for genuine connection. Those casual, late-night chats, when we all finally let our guards down, built a deep understanding of each other's limits, hopes, and fears. It built the kind of trust and safety net that no formal agenda ever could. When crisis hits our groups, a formal mediation protocol will fail if there is no underlying reservoir of trust to animate it. On the contrary, personal goodwill alone quickly dissolves into chaotic infighting if there are no concrete channels or allocated resources to process disagreement safely. To make those informal spaces meaningful, they must be backed by formal commitments: dedicated time and budget lines built directly into conference agendas for debriefing, paired with explicit, pre-agreed guidelines for surfacing grievances without threatening anyone’s standing in the coalition. Interpersonal relationships are the most basic layer of movement infrastructure, yet they are frequently treated as an afterthought. The unglamorous labor of building trust, maintaining friendships, and holding space for difficult conversations is often relegated to leisure time or dependent on professional facilitators. Building Infrastructure That Grows With Conflicts If we accept that disagreement is natural, we must stop viewing conflict as an anomaly or a failure. Too often, organizations handle conflict in one of two counterproductive ways: they sweep it under the rug to preserve surface-level harmony, or they let unaddressed grievances explode, splintering hard-won networks. Building resilient networks requires us to invest in every dimension of solidarity infrastructure including conflict literacy. Just as physical buildings require underground shock absorbers to survive earthquakes, cross-border solidarity require built-in systems to absorb conflicts. We need pre-agreed repair protocols that establish clear pathways for peer mediation, removing the panic and ambiguity when disagreements arise. And we must allocate real resources for care, explicitly budgeting time and funding for relationship-building and crisis resolution rather than treating them as uncompensated background labor. When this infrastructure is maintained across all its layers, conflict becomes a natural process that deepens trust and expands our collective capacity. Having focused heavily on building regional networks over the past few years, I realize that our capacity to organize across borders is vital if we hope to challenge powerful tech giants and authoritarian labor regimes. But our formal structures are only as strong as the infrastructure supporting them. If we want to build a resilient, long-lasting movement, we must invest heavily in the mundane, essential work of building and maintaining these eco-system. We need fewer rigid, transactional networks and more intentional infrastructure where organizers and workers can disagree, fail, and grow together over the long haul. Until next time, Kiang Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

5. 

   23 Jun 2026

   We Aren't All Samsung Workers

   (Photo by Sung Jin Cho (https://unsplash.com/@mbuff?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/a-large-statue-of-a-woman-in-an-orange-dress-Ja7ICTTYXqk?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)) Dear Friends, For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading media coverage of the Samsung Electronics union negotiation. I can’t remember the last time mainstream outlets paid this much attention to a labor struggle in Asia. But the more I read, the more uneasy I felt. Here’s what most reports didn’t say: this deal is an exception, not a norm in the labor movement. It’s a story of division. In this post, I want to invite us to cut through the “winner-take-all” mindset and move toward holding AI capital accountable to all workers, not only to the strongest unions, especially those invisible along the global AI supply chains. Beyond that, we must aim higher and fight for redistributing the AI wealth to everyone. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A Success Story of Division As the narrative goes, Samsung workers were on the verge of a historic strike (https://thecorner.eu/news-the-world/samsung-faces-biggest-strike-in-its-history-18-days-for-over-45000-employees-if-no-resolution-reached-today/125764/), with 45,000 employees prepared to launch a 18-day strike (https://www.ft.com/content/61671fa3-9ad8-42d1-adc6-ffb3aeb7a9f8?syn-25a6b1a6=1) that threatened to halt operations at the tech giant’s critical manufacturing facilities. Faced with that pressure, management backed down in a late-night negotiation session mediated by government officials (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2026/05/21/companies/samsung-union-deal-strike/) to avert a prolonged dispute and feared national (https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10735318) and global crises (https://aimagazine.com/news/ai-crisis-averted-samsung-workers-union-calls-off-strike). Ultimately, the company signed a deal (https://qz.com/samsung-electronics-union-bonus-pay-deal-strike-052726)committing 10.5% of its semiconductor operating profit directly to worker bonuses for the next decade. For some chip workers, a worker earning an 80-million-won base salary could take home around 626 million won (https://qz.com/samsung-electronics-union-bonus-pay-deal-strike-052726) in combined bonuses this year. Sensationalism aside, the media still paints AI as an incredible money-printing (https://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-ai-chip-trillion-dollar-boom-profit-sharing-worker-strike-2026-5#:~:text=Talks%20between%20Samsung%20and%20its,reports%20that%20negotiations%20had%20collapsed.) magic. Crucially, the profit-sharing scheme only applies to Samsung’s semiconductor division, while workers in consumer electronics or smartphones are excluded. So you could have two groups of workers within the same company, with very different paychecks. What this does, even unintentionally, is to enforce a real hierarchy. A kind of “tech aristocracy” inside the industries. These are the top-tiers engineers who graduates from the top South Korean universities who benefit directly from the AI windfall, while those assembling everyday consumer products are excluded. This reflects a broader fragmentation within South Korean labor. Unlike the unions at rival SK hynix (https://startupfortune.com/samsungs-last-minute-bonus-deal-signals-that-ais-productivity-windfall-is-becoming-a-labor-negotiation-rather-than-a-corporate-perk/#:~:text=After%20threatening%20a%20strike%20involving,profit%20will%20flow%20directly%20to)—where technical and office workers are organized under the militant Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) and full-time production workers are affiliated (https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-it/2026/05/31/JAMRB6OMRBDCXF7NPL5IXC7IWI/) with the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU)—the Samsung Electronics Union operates largely in isolation, rather than as an integrated part of a cross-industry labor movement. Why Not Socializing The AI Wealth? During the Samsung strike episode, progressive policymakers and labor leaders in South Korea began discussing this profit-sharing mechanism through the lens of a citizen’s dividend (https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10772379). In fact, the KCTU (https://www.ajupress.com/view/20260611091270849) has formally raised the need to socially redistribute these massive excess AI profits to subcontracted workers and local communities via a “social solidarity wage.” Instead of letting AI windfalls flow only to executives and a lucky tier of specialist workers, we must tax a portion of those excess corporate profits and redistribute them universally to everyone. The wealth being generated by AI rush doesn’t come from the “ingenuity” of tech companies or the labor of chip workers. The AI wealth depends heavily on the physical exploitation of our public infrastructure and natural resources. Across Southeast Asia, the rapid expansion of hyper-scale AI data centers is putting an unprecedented strain on local electrical grids, consuming massive amounts of water for cooling, and absorbing valuable land. If the semiconductor hubs are the chokepoints controlled by labor, the data centers are the chokepoints controlled by people and their governments. In a very real sense, AI profits are built on a physical and digital commons that belongs to all of us. Reimagining What Labor Power Means None of this discounts the Samsung union’s incredible leverage. The Samsung deal proved that workers have real power when they position themselves at the bottlenecks of global capital. But it also exposes the limits of fighting company by company or industry by industry. If we limit our vision of labor power to a highly organized tier of “skilled” semiconductor workers winning historic payouts, we have already lost the battle. What about ghost workers and AI trainers across the Global South? And the communities hosting their data centers who bear the ecological and economic costs alone? As I have already repeated several times in this newsletter, we must connect the struggles of the workers inside the AI supply chain with the struggles of the communities outside the data centers. The ultimate goal of the Asian labor movement must be about asserting collective power over the ownership and control of technology. That requires deep movement- and coalition-building far beyond the traditional scope of individual union battles. The AI boom will continue to divide us unless we view infrastructure as a public utility and technological windfalls as a collective inheritance. The wealth generated by this moment should, and must, belong to all of us! Until next time, Kiang Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

6. 

   9 Jun 2026

   One Year of Asian Labor Futures: the New Chapter

   Dear friends, This July, Asian Labor Futures turns one, and this milestone alone deserves reflection and recognition. When I first launched this Substack, I didn't have a complete roadmap. To be completely honest, I still don’t. Up until now, I’ve treated this space as a conduit for my curiosity and creativity. It has been an invaluable space for me to hone public communication skills and connect fragments of thoughts. I only have a few paid subscribers, all of whom I know personally, and I want to sincerely thank their foundational support. Also, to every single person who has left a comment, shared a post, or engaged in solidarity: I really appreciate you! In this post, I want to take a moment to look back at what this year of writing has brought me and share some exciting updates about where Asian Labor Futures is heading next. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Groundedness and Gratitude Every now and then, I succumbed to the platform’s algorithmic nudges—the seductive idea of rapid growth or generating a steady stream of income. But reality has a way of grounding us. I have felt that Substack’s libertarian vibe is a poor fit for “my people”. Moreover, its algorithm seems designed to keep creators busy with superficial chitchat rather than focusing on substantive work. This is a social platform inherently at odd with my worker-centric, movement-building approach. Lately, subscriber count has plateaued, and despite being here for almost a year, I have learned very little about who my readers actually are. Despite these roadblocks, building this Substack has both deepened my thinking and reshaped other areas of my work. My favorite pieces to write are those that cross-pollinate ideas, like blending adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy or Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work on moss ecology with my own research on labor activism. This synthesis has led to breakthroughs in how I understand adaptation and resilience, both in grassroots organizing and organizational structure. I hope these insights offer some value to you. I recently wrapped up the “Reimagining Asian Labor Futures” course with the Asian Labor School, while many early posts have become central discussion points for Season 3 of the Continent of Resistance podcast—my collaborative project that I have been a co-producer and co-host since 2024. I can’t wait for the new season to be available! The Next Chapter This July also marks a significant milestone for me. I am wrapping up my Just Tech fellowship, bringing an incredible two-year journey to a close. As I prepare for the next chapter in my personal and professional life, I’m also excited to share that applications for the next cohort are officially open (https://www.ssrc.org/programs/just-tech/just-tech-fellowship/)! If you work on labor and technology, and are interested to apply, please feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to answer any questions about the fellowship. While Asian Labor Futures has taken a slow but steady pace, big things have been brewing behind the scenes. I am very excited to share two major updates about the future of this project. A New Digital Home I’ve been working with an incredible group of designers from Taiwan to build a dedicated website for Asian Labor Futures. They are from Co-Assembly Cooperative (https://coassembly.work/), the very first design cooperative in Taiwan. I highly encourage you to check them out! Working with like-minded Asian creators who share a deep commitment to social and labor justice has been an absolute joy. A New Research Collective In parallel, my collaborator Pei Palmgren and I are building a small collective of seasoned Asian researchers deeply embedded in grassroots organizations. Envisioned as a worker-owned cooperative, it will provide research consultancy and strategic advisory at the vital intersections of labor, migration, technology, and climate justice. With the funding landscape shifting rapidly—as traditional nonprofit aid dries up and private capital rushes in—it is more urgent than ever to build a grounded, collective effort that shapes regional strategy from the bottom up. It is still in the very early stages, but I am incredibly energized by this new journey. Drop me a line if you’re interested to partner or connect with us. What would happen to this Substack? I haven’t fully decided on the fate of this newsletter just yet. Once our new digital home is properly built and decorated, I will reach out to ask all of you—my subscribers and followers—whether you’d like to migrate with me to the new space. Thank you for being part of this journey. Stay tuned for what’s next! With gratitude, Kiang Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

7. 

   30 May 2026

   Spirituality, AI, and Illusion of Separation

   Dear friends, Life has a way of arriving all at once. I’ve been yearning to write, but illness got in the way. Since recovering, I've been catching up with our ongoing Reimagining Asian Labor Futures course. It is a heavy world to witness right now: migrants on hunger strikes in the US, escalating strikes in Iran, and the relentless killing of Palestinians despite the so-called “ceasefire.” Lately, I’ve found myself thinking deeply about wholeness. Specifically, what it means to live and work as complete human beings in a world that constantly tries to separate us. My own research on automation makes me acutely aware of its limitations; because AI relies entirely on our past data, it lacks the living presence required to teach us about futures. Inspired by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s recent piece on AI and spirituality in Emergence Magazine, I want to invite us to view our collective resistance to AI and automation not merely as a defensive fight, but as a reclamation of labor as a sacred site of human dignity and shared liberation. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Wholeness and The Tragedy of Modernity Carl Jung once warned that modern society risked becoming dangerously one-sided: cultivating the intellect while cutting itself off from the unconscious depths of the soul. For Jung, human wholeness depended on the difficult and lifelong process of integration, or the reconciliation of consciousness with the unconscious, reason with feeling, or intellect with spirit. The tragedy of modernity is not simply that we have become rational, but that we have mistaken rationality for completeness. This fragmentation is deeply embedded within capitalist society. We are trained to identify with the ego alone: the productive or the measurable self. We learn to value speed over slow reflection, and efficiency over relationship. The parts of ourselves that cannot be quantified: grief, intuition, care, and spiritual longing, are treated as irrational residues to be managed or eliminated. Artificial intelligence emerges from this worldview and intensifies it. It reflects a civilization increasingly unable to distinguish intelligence from wisdom, or data from consciousness. They reproduce language without embodiment, and simulation without soul. What inspired all of this reflection came from an insightful article on AI and spirituality by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee in Emergence Magazine. Vaughan-Lee points to the interlocking crises we face, spiritual and ecological, as posing an existential danger to our species. In capitalist society, we have lost our way, cultivating only the growth of the ego while suppressing and stunting the soul. AI, as the apotheosis of consumerism and extractivism, accelerates us toward that cliff. And it does so hand in hand with the destruction of our planet, our only home. The Illusion of Separation and Autonomy Yet, the soul has always resisted domination. Human beings are not machines to be optimized. We are contradictory, emotional, relational, and unfinished. When societies suppress the dimensions of life that cannot be instrumentalized, they create profound alienation. This alienation deepens when we forget what our teacher Thich Nhat Hanh called interbeing—the profound truth that nothing exists in isolation, and that we are all fundamentally interconnected. To understand interbeing is to recognize that the worker, the community, the soil, and the tools we use are part of a singular, living web. Technological reductionism, by contrast, relies on the illusion of absolute separation. It seeks to chop up our lives into discrete, exploitable metrics, stripping away the “inefficient” elements of our existence: our need for deep rest, our messy emotional realities, and the slow, unquantifiable time required to build genuine relationships of care. Reclaiming Labor as a Sacred and Collective Act Both the lens of interbeing and Vaughan-Lee’s analysis expose the inherent limitations of AI: it is a machine of the past, a calcification of accumulated historical data. The work we are called to do, by contrast, must be future-oriented, transformative, and deeply human. Labor, at its core, is the way we participate in interbeing. It is how we care for one another, shape our material reality, and sustain life. When we engage in purposeful labor—whether through formal employment, organizing on the ground, or the invisible, vital work of care within our communities—we are exercising our capacity for collective wisdom, empathy, and agency. The ultimate danger is not just that machines may displace human hands. It is that entire societies are being reorganized around values that render human beings disposable, replacing the vibrant, relational nature of labor with a hollow, mechanical efficiency. As we move forward, let us reject the illusion that AI can save us, or that progress is measured by the speed of our extraction. The real change, or the kind that heals our social and ecological polycrisis remains deeply, quietly human. It lives in our souls, and our collective will to demand a world that honors our whole selves. Our task is to defend labor as a site of human dignity and collective resistance. We must cultivate a practice of work and struggle that refuses to be quantified, structured around the real needs of our communities rather than the demands of capital. We are here to be awake, to care for one another, and to build a future where our labor is an expression of our shared liberation. In solidarity, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

8. 

   14 May 2026

   Who's Steering Our "Driverless" Future?

   (original photo by Hoseung Han (https://unsplash.com/@dhs4590?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/a-white-car-is-stopped-at-an-intersection-nYMmmrYxISY?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText); edited by myself) Dear friends, In March, I wrote about Baidu’s Apollo Go (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/p/can-we-stop-robotaxis-from-taking) experiments in Wuhan. The takeaway is that the so-called “self-driving” car is far from autonomous. At the end of April, the myth of autonomy hit a physical wall in Wuhan. Over 100 stalled vehicles reportedly paralyzed the city's traffic, leading to suspension of new permits (https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-suspends-new-autonomous-vehicle-permits-after-baidu-outage-bloomberg-news-2026-04-29/). Meanwhile in the US, Waymo made headlines in February when it was pushed to reveal more about its operations. Despite the “driverless” marketing, Waymo relies on a corps of backup responders in the Philippines (https://mobility.techcrunch.com/p/waymo-makes-its-defense). Today, I want to shine a spotlight on the workers deliberately kept invisible and connect them with those who train the machine. As we start seeing them as essential parts of the assembly line, it becomes clear these workers hold a unique, untapped power over the fragile system. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Global Backseat Driver The revelation came during a February 2026 Senate hearing, where Waymo’s Chief Safety Officer admitted that when their robotaxis encounter “edge cases” (https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/waymo-admits-its-robotaxis-call-filipino-response-agents-for-help)— scenarios the AI cannot resolve—they “phone a human friend (https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2026/waymo-s-autonomous-cars-get--guidance--from-philippines-.html)” in centers located in two cities in the Philippines. The resulting online debates were often clouded by xenophobia, revealing how little the public understands about the global tech infrastructure. Offshoring isn’t new; AI is just the latest shell. These workers designated internally as ‘fleet response agents’ are the ones who tell the car how to navigate a confusing construction zone or while encountering a plastic bag. While Waymo insists these agents do not “drive” (https://mobility.techcrunch.com/p/waymo-makes-its-defense) the cars, they provide the cognitive judgement that the machine lacks. In the industry’s own infrastructure, these Filipino workers act as the human hardware required to bridge the gap between code and the chaotic reality of city streets. But we must remember that these responders are only the last mile of a much longer labor supply chain. The Chains of Data and Automation Workers Companies like Waymo rely heavily on the global labor platforms like Scale AI and Remotasks for its data pipeline (https://www.etui.org/sites/default/files/2024-12/HM29_The%20Filipino%20workers%20at%20the%20sharp%20end%20of%20AI_2024.pdf). This work is maintained by Filipino annotators who work 12-hour shifts labeling 3D LiDAR data points, training Waymo’s software to navigate real-world environments by identifying everything from pedestrians to roadside signage. In cities like Cagayan de Oro in Mindanao, several thousands of data annotators perform the grueling foundational labor for companies like Waymo and Alphabet, its parent company. It is a multi-billion dollar industry built on invisible workers, from the US vantage, who often earn as little as $1.00 to $2.00 per hour, frequently bypassing local labor protections. This invisibility is a theme explored in Glenn Diaz’s 2017 acclaimed novel, The Quiet Ones. In the crime thriller set against the backdrop of globalization, BPO workers navigate a world where they are physically in the Philippines but mentally and linguistically tethered to the US. They are “the quiet ones” because the global economy requires their silence to function. The moment the customer, or the robotaxi passenger, realizes a Filipino worker is steering the experience, the “magic” of Western innovation evaporates. The frequent incidents of Baidu’s Apollo Go and Waymo vehicles getting stalled by something as trivial as a plastic bag—whether on the streets of Wuhan or at intersections in San Francisco—reveal not only the invisibility, but fragility in action. These breakdowns turn robotaxis into useless chunks of metal blocking public streets. The magic disappears. From the Bottleneck to Openings The reality of this ‘just-in-time’ workforce is undeniable: without the Global South, the driverless dream grinds to a halt. But where the industry sees a “risk,” we must recognize our leverage. The very fact that Waymo’s fleet freezes without human input grants these workers a unique structural power. In theory, we could use such power to create a massive disruption. For too long, tech giants have rendered Global South labor invisible. But invisibility allows for operation under the radar. Much like the protagonists in The Quiet Ones, a group of BPO workers have learned to exploit loopholes in the system, reversing the flow of extraction through their own subversive schemes. For labor activists, the strategy is rooted in a clear paradox: the industry’s push for global expansion only intensifies its dependence on this specific, localized labor pool. Our resistance must be as global as their supply chains. By connecting the dots from the data annotators to the fleet responders, we see that the machine does not move without us. Our struggle is to turn that dependence into power. They may own the cars, but we own the intelligence that makes them more than just expensive scrap metal. Until next time, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

9. 

   2 May 2026

   The Scaffolding of Allyship

   Dear friends, This piece arrives in the wake of May Day 2026. It is my custom to remain silent on International Workers’ Day itself, stepping back to ensure that workers’ voices occupy center stage. Last week, I attended the Labor and AI Symposium at Yale University. The personal highlight was joining a roundtable with two speakers from the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Sharing my work alongside fellow labor advocates was a powerful reminder of why we do this. But being in a prestigious institution was a reminder of the friction inherent in how we do it. In the spirit of May Day, I want to offer some critical but solidaristic reflections on moving from institutional allyship to genuine partnership with workers. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Great Wall of Privilege Since this visit was my first to New Haven, Connecticut, I arrived with no preconceived notions of the city. Walking through the downtown area, I was struck by the city’s two starkly different faces. On one side is the polished, Ivy League glow of the Yale campus; on the other is the heavy, everyday reality of poverty within the Black community. This contrast mirrors a feeling I have carried for a long time: the tension of straddling the worlds of intellectual exercise and social change. Just as I was startled by the divide between the sophistication of Yale campus and the post-industrial struggle of its surroundings, I’ve long struggled with the chasm between the research produced by academic institutions and the immediate, material needs of the workers I stand with. While scholars are often preoccupied with deepening theoretical analyses of labor platforms, my work in coalition-building exposes a different urgency. Workers desperately need their labor and employment to be recognized by legal frameworks so workers can access basic rights. Historically, this institutional distance was framed as a prerequisite for 'objectivity.' But today, those boundaries have hardened into a Great Wall—one that keeps out the very people whose lives are being “studied.” The Precarity of the Bridge Existing in the space between these two worlds is the work of democratizing knowledge. Out of a personal frustration that research often dies in gated journals, I have committed to using inquiry as a tool for organizing, worker empowerment, and policy advocacy from below. But a bridge is a fragile thing when the distance it tries to cover remains far too wide. For the past two years, the Just Tech Fellowship has allowed me to keep one foot in academia and the other in practice. This support is the only reason I can offer the Asian Labor Futures pro bono. However, even with this rare support, we remain caught in an exhausting, transactional choreography. As an intermediary organization, we find ourselves constantly translating the “immediate needs” of workers into the “deliverables” required by institutions. Whether it is a Western foundation or a university research center, the dynamic is often the same: we are asked to bend our reality to fit their reporting cycles. To Our Institutional Allies: Reimagine Collaboration In my experience, both academic and philanthropic collaboration often feel like a forced contract. Whether you are a researcher or a program officer, you frequently approach community-based organizations with a “packaged deal.” You arrive with the framework already set, the methodology fixed, and the goals decided by university administrations or board priorities. Sometimes, if the research grant is already secured, our names are included as “partners” without us even being asked. This is not an invitation to co-create; it is an invitation to sign off on a project already in motion. To truly move from allyship to partnership, both foundations and academia must resist the urge to control the output. True solidarity means moving away from top-down metrics that serve your donors more than our communities. It means trusting the people on the ground to define what success looks like. To Academia, true co-creation means starting the conversation before the grant is written. It means asking: “What research does your movement actually need to win?” . Ultimately, if you want to change the world from the inside of these resourceful institutions, academic workers too must organize. You must build your collective power to contest the terms imposed by your own administrations. The walls are high, and for the most part, they exist to preserve the status quo. To break them down requires both the willpower and the action to start from within. In solidarity, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

10. 

    21 Apr 2026

    Reimagining Asian Labor Futures Begins

    (Photo by Oh Taeyeon (https://unsplash.com/@ohtaeyeon?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/photos/the-ceiling-of-a-building-with-a-lot-of-different-colors-iPRi3UY4Y2M?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)) Dear friends, This post arrives a little late. I was away in New York City for my retreat. I'll share some updates about the fellowship I've been part of since 2024. A transformative journey now nearing its close. This month, my colleagues and family in Thailand also celebrated Songkran, the traditional Thai New Year. Communities across Southeast and South Asia share versions of this tradition, all rooted in the solar calendar and a common spirit of cleansing and renewal. Water is poured to wash away the old year's dust. Space is made for what comes next. In that spirit, some news about convergence and renewal across my projects, and a reflection on what collective organizing can offer to complement critical art at this technological moment. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A New Page Since August 2024, I've been part of the Social Science Research Council's Just Tech Fellowship, which is always a source of inspiration and support. During my retreat last week, I got a privilege to use a space at the New Museum—New York's museum dedicated to contemporary art, and home to NEW INC, its incubator for practitioners working across art, technology, and design. The museum had just reopened with New Humans: Memories of the Future, a sweeping exhibition exploring how technology reshapes what it means to be human. A fitting setting for our cohort of researchers, artists, and technologists all grappling with the question of just technological futures. This May and June, I will be offering a new course, Reimagining Labor Futures, at the Asian Labor School. Structured over five sessions, the course is built around the research and writing I’ve developed through the Asian Labor Futures initiative since its launch in July 2025. This course is the culmination of almost two years spent immersed in the study of labor and technology. It is an invitation to look beyond both the narratives of technological inevitability and "tech for good" and instead analyze these shifts through a labor movement lens. My hope is to create space for activists and organizers in Asia. Not only to examine the impacts and limits of technology, but to build strategies that contest and reshape the systems dictating our ways of working. The Old Fight We’re In The dominant AI discourse—and the way this technology is built and deployed—is deeply problematic. The stakes for workers and labor movements are enormous, not least because we are all producers of the data that fuels these systems. Perhaps the most consequential impact is the radical organization of work and concentration of economic-political power in the hands of a few technology corporations. There is an undeniable class dimension to this shift. The traditional institution of waged work—long critiqued by the left—is visibly eroding. The past decade of platformization has made waged employment the lesser of two evils when set against the gig economy’s stripped-down alternative. Platform workers in on-demand logistics and services have been on the front lines, laying track across a digital frontier that often lacks basic protections. Now AI data trainers face heightened precarity, frequently under conditions that are mentally and physically abusive. For labor organizers, proactively engaging with the rollout of AI is no longer optional. Most of Asia still serves as a source of extraction for the global tech industries. The implications vary by country and sector, but this structural position is the common condition. What We Offer This brings me back to the critique of technology through art and design, to what I’ve been learning from my fellow cohort members. Many of them are artists and creative technologists, and their work is genuinely illuminating. They make visible what corporate narratives obscure, they stage encounters that provoke new ways of seeing. I have deep respect for these practices. And yet, walking through New Humans, I noticed that most of the artistic responses on display shared a common grammar: the individual creator confronting the machine, the singular vision made legible through the institution. Even when the work named exploitation or surveillance, the mode of engagement remained fundamentally individualist. It is a limit of form. And it points to what the labor movement can uniquely offer in this moment: not just critique, but collective contestation. A vehicle for organizing the power to change the conditions. The AI battleground is, above all, a fight against the imposition and closure of choices and collective agency. As I’ve learned from the engaged artists and technologists, technology is a matter of choices, and choices are always possible—but only if there is organized power behind them. The labor movement can and must find a strategic point of intervention. To do that, we need to understand exactly what we are up against: the strengths, the limitations, and the vulnerabilities of these systems, which are plentiful. I look forward to starting that process with you. Until next time, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

11. 

    10 Apr 2026

    Oil Crisis and Rage in South and Southeast Asia

    Dear friends, The current massive oil disruption has exposed dynamics in Asian politics and workers’ power. In Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, mass movements recently proved they could topple entrenched authoritarians, yet they now struggle to stop fuel price hikes. Meanwhile, in the Philippines and Indonesia in particular, experiences from decades of working within parliamentarian politics are forcing governments to internalize the costs of the crisis. In this piece, I examine the “warp and weft” of Asian labor politics contrasting the street power with the institutional anchor of the workers, and why the future of the region depends on synthesizing the two. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Sri Lanka and Bangladesh: After the Uprisings In South Asia, social movements were powerful enough to topple dictators but are now institutionally weak to stop gas price hikes because these are backed by IMF-mandated austerity. Sri Lanka’s 2022 Aragalaya movement forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee. Yet, in March 2026, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake—the very man many hoped would champion the poor—raised fuel prices by a third and reintroduced QR-code fuel rationing (https://www.tamilguardian.com/content/sri-lanka-revives-crisis-era-fuel-rationing-tourism-drops-and-panic-buying-sets). Why? Sri Lanka is trapped in the post-revolutionary ‘democracy’. Dissanayake’s 2024 two-thirds parliamentary majority gave him immense democratic legitimacy. Because his party, the NPP, was the political beneficiary of the uprising, people are struggling to strike against a "people’s government" (https://english.alarabiya.net/News/world/2026/04/04/sri-lanka-struggles-to-avert-economic-collapse-over-iran-war#:~:text=jet%20Middle%20East-,Sri%20Lanka%20struggles%20to%20avert%20economic%20collapse%20over%20Iran%20war,4%20min%20read) that is currently using its legitimacy to enforce IMF-mandated austerity. Bangladesh (https://www.thedailystar.net/news/bangladesh/news/bangladesh-highly-exposed-hormuz-squeeze-4140506) follows a similar logic. The 2024 student uprising that toppled Sheikh Hasina proved that mass mobilization can bring down entrenched power. But in the aftermath, the energy has been absorbed into constitutional battles. The government introduced rationing on March 6, then quietly lifted it on March 15 (https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia-pacific/south-asia/bangladesh) before the end of Ramadan. The fuel crisis is producing localized rage (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/04/02/iran-war-fuel-shortages-violence/)—gas station workers attacked or killed in fuel thefts—and queues stretching for kilometers, yet there is no coordinated response from labor. This is because, under Hasina, most major unions were appendages of the state, the Awami League. When the regime fell, those labor structures collapsed or went into hiding (https://communistusa.org/bangladeshi-workers-begin-to-move/#:~:text=Workers%20are%20organizing%20themselves%20and,their%20economic%20and%20political%20demands.). Philippines and Indonesia: Keep the Rage Burning The Philippines is seeing the most organized resistance in the region right now. After President Marcos declared a National Energy Emergency on March 24, transport groups launched nationwide tigil-pasada: transport strikes. The No to Oil Price Hike (https://www.instagram.com/p/DWNcjl_gsmm/) coalition—uniting jeepney drivers, motorcycle taxi riders, tricycle operators, and platform workers—took to the streets with structural demands: wage increases and the repeal of the Oil Deregulation Law (https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2026/03/10/2513336/oil-deregulation-law-complicates-response-fuel-price-spikes-solons) and the TRAIN (The TRAIN Law (Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion) Law. The 1998 Downstream Oil Industry Deregulation Act dismantled the stabilization funds (https://pistonph.com/27-years-of-oil-deregulation-bleeding-drivers-dry-while-oil-cartels-rake-in-profits-piston/) that once buffered pump prices, transferring control entirely to a handful of large oil firms. By 2025, jeepney drivers were spending an estimated 60% of their daily earnings (https://pistonph.com/27-years-of-oil-deregulation-bleeding-drivers-dry-while-oil-cartels-rake-in-profits-piston/) on fuel alone. Workers are not just asking for temporary relief; they are contesting the very rules of the market (https://www.ibon.org/ph-oil-troubles/). Last September, I wrote (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/p/what-does-the-future-hold-for-enraged) about the rage of youth in Indonesia—an uprising symbolized by Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old delivery rider killed during a protest in Jakarta. The protests began over lawmakers awarding themselves housing allowances nearly ten times the Jakarta minimum wage, but Affan’s death made the economic stakes of the working class visceral and undeniable. In that piece, I asked: what does the future hold for enraged Indonesian youth? This crisis is beginning to answer that question. That uprising forced the Indonesian government to internalize the cost of ignoring workers. The Prabowo government has pledged no increases for subsidized fuel in 2026, absorbing the fiscal blow through cuts to ministry spending and a new coal export tax — even as the deficit approaches its legal ceiling of 3% of GDP (https://jakartaglobe.id/business/indonesia-rules-out-subsidized-fuel-price-hike-as-oil-nears-120-per-barrel). In a region where governments are passing every cost directly to workers, Indonesia is holding the line. Why? Prabowo is not just afraid of another Affan Kurniawan. Organized labor’s role as a political agent has forced the state to internalize social stability as a non-negotiable cost. That is what institutional power looks like when it works. Not just the capacity to mobilize, but the capacity to have already changed the rules of the game. The ‘Ungovernable’ and the ‘Indispensable’ What we are witnessing across Asia is not a series of disconnected crises, but interconnected struggles. The uprisings in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh proved that when the politics becomes a machine for its own survival, it does no longer serve the people. These movements opened the door to the future, and they did not need to ask for any permission. The power is theirs to begin with. The civil society and organized labor in the Philippines and Indonesia represent indispensable political actor that occupies that open space. While a mass uprising can topple a leader, it is the organizational muscle of transport unions and platform worker coalitions that keep the government in check from sliding back into the old logic of the IMF. These two models are the warp and weft of Asian labor politics. Without the explosion of the street, the institutional work remains trapped in the illusion of political participation. But without the institutional anchor, the explosion eventually dissipates into a vacuum filled up by the elites and technocrats. The political future, then, cannot be made in either the street or the union hall. It is made in their synthesis. It is the capacity to be both ungovernable in the face of injustice and indispensable in the work of governance. In solidarity, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

12. 

    30 Mar 2026

    Outside Artificial "Intelligence": Embodied Knowledge and Thick Solidarity

    Dear friends, In my last piece, I wrote about Apollo Go’s robotaxis in Wuhan and framed their technical failures as a strategic opening for workers. I want to stay with this a little longer, because that technological limit is telling us something important about what “artificial intelligence” actually is, and what workers actually do. A book I’ve been reading, Ways of Being by James Bridle, opens with a provocation: intelligence is not what we think it is. We’ve built AI on a narrow idea of what minds do: calculating, optimizing, processing symbols. But Bridle argues this image was always incomplete. Intelligence doesn’t happen inside a brain; it happens between a body and a world. I want to use that as a jumping point for rethinking solidarity, not as feelings or a posture, but as a form of social infrastructure. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Collective Knowledge that Machines (Fail to) Replicate Driving is one of the most complex tasks humans perform, yet it feels effortless to most of us. It’s nearly impossible to replicate in a machine. There’s a technical name for this: the Moravec paradox. What is easiest for us is hardest for machines, and vice versa. Driving is a relational activity: reading the slight hesitation of a motorbike about to cut across your lane, sensing the rhythm of a street that slows at certain hours, knowing from experience that the puddle on this corner is deeper than it looks in the rainy season. This knowledge lives in the relationship between a body and a place, built over years of moving through it. It cannot be cleanly extracted and fed into a training dataset. Yet workers are mislabeled “unskilled,” a classification with a long history, from the factory to the platform economy, of management taking exactly this kind of knowledge and placing it up the chain of command. What remains with the workers gets reclassified as simple execution requiring no particular intelligence. The robotaxi is the same story, albeit unfinished, played out on the street. And where the machine still falls short, tech companies now recruit people who desperately need income to close the gap, training algorithms in real-life conditions, on poverty wages, so the machine can eventually replace them too. What Workers Build Within the Entanglement I’ve often felt a disconnect between the reality I see on the ground and calls for “full automation” or “post-work” futures coming from some corners of the Western left. These are important political horizons, but they can obscure the immediate question facing workers who are already inside the system and cannot simply opt out. But the delivery riders I work with don’t have that option. By economic necessity, they are inside the relationship with the machine—the app, the algorithm, the gamification system. The question for them is not whether to engage with technology, but what to build within that entanglement. Workers are not jut redefining themselves in the process. They are building something inside these platforms that the algorithm never intended and cannot control. This isn’t just about collective bargaining; it’s about workers coming to know one another, recognizing that the social world the algorithm depends on is actually ours. The routing algorithms that guide platform logistics are built on the accumulated navigational intelligence of thousands of workers. This is collective labor in its purest form. And it raises a clear political demand: what is collectively produced must be collectively owned. The moment we begin to claim that knowledge together, we reclaim our “world-making rights.” What This Means for Solidarity Building Building collective power from within is difficult. Not just strategically, but subjectively. Platforms are designed to deplete the very capacities that organizing depends on: the desire to connect, the capacity for trust. What we can do as movement builders is support workers' initiatives that start small and molecular: a mutual aid project or a savings circle. These are the first bricks of a solidarity infrastructure. This is similar to what scholars Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange call thick solidarity: building from workers' actual, embodied positions, across real differences in their conditions, led by those most directly inside the machine. Unlike thin digital connections designed to keep us isolated, thick solidarity creates recurring obligations, shared risk, and belonging that doesn't disappear when accounts are deactivated. One framework I’ve found generative comes from the US-based Building Movement Project, which uses scaffolding (https://nonprofitquarterly.org/how-to-build-solidarity-infrastructure-for-the-long-haul/) as a central metaphor. Scaffolding is the support system that makes it possible to build something larger than ourselves. Not the final structure, but what protects our collective energy while we’re building it. It’s what moves us from constant reaction toward shared governance and lasting power. Platform worker movements desperately need this kind of bridge between current capacity and actual need. Between what capital permits and what justice requires. And we should be honest with ourselves: what we’re building in the meantime may not look pretty, but that’s ok. Until next time, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

13. 

    20 Mar 2026

    Can We Stop Robotaxis From Taking Over?

    Dear friends, It may be time to talk about robotaxis, or “driverless” taxi service. Not as a tech trend to get you excited, but as the next front in a battle that platform workers across Asia have been fighting for over a decade. The struggles of ride-hailing drivers and delivery workers in China and across Asia are still unfolding. Still raw. Yet, the rapid rise of robotaxis now threatens to upend this already precarious workforce once again. What took more than a decade to build; nascent labor organizations among app-based drivers may face another round of disruption, destabilizing the political formations workers have painstakingly built. I want to resist the narrative of inevitability and to encourage activists to think strategically. Our labor built the platform economy, and that history provides a map for our next moves against robotaxis. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Chinese Platform Drivers in Surviving Modes In China, ride-hailing drivers have long worked under intense pressure to make ends meet. According to a report by the National Business Daily, multiple regions issued warnings since mid-2024 that platforms had flooded the market with overcrowded drivers (https://www.nbd.com.cn/articles/2024-08-09/3498269.html). As a result, drivers’ daily revenues reportedly dropped sharply, pushing many to the brink. A 2024 labor review compiled by an anonymous Chinese collective known as “Straw Mushroom Stewed Chicken” (草菇炖鸡), published by an international editorial group Chuang (https://chuangcn.org/2025/09/keeping-each-other-afloat-pt-3-the-gig-economy-era-the-saturation-of-the-employment-reservoir-new-regulations-incite-controversy/), documents what survival looks like under these condition. In megacities like Beijing and Shanghai, male drivers have resorted to eating, drinking, and sleeping in their cars to save on rent, relying on paid bathhouses for hygiene. This gave rise to the “smelly car” trend on social media. Platforms like Didi responded with disciplinary measures and blacklisting features, rather than addressing the underlying dispatch algorithms or revenue-sharing models. At the same time, the workforce saw a threefold increase in women drivers, adding a gendered dimension to these conditions. And still, workers pushed back. Before shutting down in mid-2025, the China Labor Bulletin's Strike Map recorded 25 driver protests in 2024 alone, nearly 40 percent of all transport and logistics collective actions that year. Drivers were organizing under crises. Into this sitting, the robotaxis like WeRide and Apollo Go (which this article will focus on) arrived. Robotaxis Stealing the “Rice Bowl” Since its 2022 debut, Baidu’s Apollo Go has scaled rapidly across more than twenty Chinese cities. By early 2026, Apollo Go had begun operations in Dubai and partnered with Lyft in Europe (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2025/11/03/meet-the-chinese-robotaxi-doing-250000-rides-per-month/). Wuhan (https://www.baiguan.news/p/baidu-apollo-go-robotaxi-wuhan-launch) has become its primary laboratory—the first city to integrate autonomous vehicles into its highway system and urban grid at scale (https://itcanthink.substack.com/p/baidu-and-the-global-competition). As reported by Baiguan (https://www.baiguan.news/p/baidu-apollo-go-robotaxi-wuhan-launch)and Chosun (https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-international/2025/04/03/MDAYOEEEIRHG7H3GX63WRZTBVY/) News, the competition is brutal. Pricing data from the Wuhan Economic Development Zone reveals an impossible competition for ride-hailing drivers. Though Apollo Go's official starting fare may be slightly higher than ride-hailing platforms, heavy subsidies and aggressive promotions have gutted actual prices. Passengers report (https://www.baiguan.news/p/baidu-apollo-go-robotaxi-wuhan-launch)paying 4–16 yuan for a 10-kilometer robotaxi trip, compared to 18–30 yuan with a ride hailer. In mid-2024, a taxi company in Wuhan submitted a petition (https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3269790/baidu-robotaxis-draw-complaints-human-drivers-service-gains-popularity)to the city’s transport bureau, accusing robotaxis of stealing the “rice bowl” (fànwǎn) of local drivers. Among drivers, the vehicles earned a mocking nickname: shǎ luóbo : the “dumb radish.” The term refers to the machines’ awkward behavior in complex urban environments. The machines freeze at stray plastic bags, stall at confusing intersections, and create traffic jams while recalculating. Drivers joke about this. But beneath the humor lies a deeper anxiety. For many in Wuhan, ride-hailing was already a fallback livelihood, entered after losing jobs in manufacturing or construction during earlier economic slowdowns. Ride-hail driving was the “last resort” rice bowl. Now even that is under threat. Wuhan as a Laboratory for Our Struggle We must look at China as a laboratory. What is happening in Wuhan is a preview, moving at unprecedented speed. The rapid expansion of Apollo Go into the Middle East and Europe in 2026 (and WeRide into Southeast Asia) confirms that the global rollout is not a distant future. It is already here. However, we have been here before. Our consent, given out of economic necessity, was the very fuel used to build the platform economy. Now that same dynamic is powering the shift to AI-driven autonomous vehicles. We built these platforms with our labor. We have the right to decide whether they continue to run over our livelihoods. As these companies go global, our resistance must do the same. If the technology is identical in Wuhan and in Dubai, then our strategies for disruption must be shared across borders. The strength of logistic and transport workers has always been our ability to disrupt the flow of the commodities and the city. With robotaxis even more dependent on predictable environments than human drivers ever were, this weakness in the system is an opening in ours. The future of labor is a social struggle we have already been waging for a decade. We know this terrain. It is not too late to stop the robotaxis in their tracks. Until next time, Kriangsak Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

14. 

    10 Mar 2026

    When Machines Are Assigned Our Emotional Labor

    Dear friends, In my last post, I wrote about the automation of housework. Naturally, that conversation led me here. To some of the most draining work many of us will ever do: raising a child. With the recent boom in generative AI, we are seeing a rise in AI toys. It has me asking a difficult question: What does it look like to be a parent when we assign machines to perform our emotional labor? This post is an intervention against a twisted logic—the idea that the resource-heavy 'extraction' of a data center is worth more energy and investment than the life-making labor of building a human being. By necessity, this piece is deeply personal. It is also deeply political. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Exhaustion of Emotional Labor During the pandemic, I spent twelve months as a full-time caregiver to my first child while my wife went back to work. At 45, the intensity was a physical shock to a Highly Sensitive Person like myself. What I came to understand was that the real challenge came largely from managing my own feelings in order to create a desired emotional state in another human being. This is what Arlie Hochschild famously called ‘emotional labor’. In moments of bone-deep exhaustion, when my son demanded that I become Elmo or Cookie Monster, I had to summon that voice from somewhere inside the depletion. That deep acting, reshaping my internal state to meet his need, is precisely what makes parental care truly draining. And yet, it is also what makes it one of the most rewarding work a person can do. When my son became a toddler, he began to mirror my internal world. When I conjured Elmo through fatigue, I was showing him that care is reciprocal, that intimacy is built from a loop of constantly building on each other’s feelings. Parenting is not a one-way street. It is a mutual becoming. AI-Powered Toys Advanced AI companion robots are now marketed as if they can interact with children and grow alongside them. Industrialists are selling the idea that machines can soothe and tutor. In a recent conversation in Interactions magazine, an AI researcher (https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/september-october-2025/when-our-kid-has-a-human-and-an-ai-lover-a-conversation-with-alexandra-diening-on-the-future-of-relationships) describes an “empathy deficit” at the core of current AI systems. Large language models can simulate “cognitive empathy” predicting what someone might feel based on data but they lack “affective empathy”. What it means is that they do not feel the weight of another person’s vulnerability. I would not call that care, because caring is so much more than a performance of soothing words. Political theorist Joan Tronto argues that care has integrity only when it completes a full cycle: caring about (noticing need), caring for (taking responsibility), care-giving (the act itself), and care-receiving (the response that closes the loop). When I used my Cookie Monster voice while exhausted, I was completing that loop. I noticed his need. I took responsibility. I gave care. And my son received it, and gave something back. AI-powered toys can mimic care-giving, but they cannot care for. They do not worry about a child’s future. This is before we even get to the privacy risks, including the recent leak of conversations between children and chatbot-powered toys made by the Mumbai-based company Miko (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/ai-toy-maker-exposed-thousands-responses-kids-senators-miko-rcna258326), and broader expert warnings that children talking to ChatGPT-powered toys are being exposed to unsolicited and harmful contents (https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/trouble-in-toyland-2025-a-i-bots-and-toxics-represent-hidden-dangers/). Realistically, these toys are often just a sophisticated upgrade from a tablet—but one that demands significantly more parental supervision (see my previous post (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/p/the-automation-of-housework-beyond) regarding the added mental load created by the digitalization of household communication). These are real and urgent threats. But my critique of AI childcare goes further than them. The ‘Value’ of Life-Making There is a form of work that often goes unnamed, yet it is what keeps the world turning: the slow, quiet process of ‘making a person’. It encompasses all the unpaid, invisible efforts that happen behind the scenes—the feeding, the diaper-changing, and the exhausting labor of building emotional intelligence. It is the work of shaping a life so that, one day, that life can step out into the world. Under our current system, this labor has always been at odds with the clock. Capitalism demands that we be efficient and productive, yet raising a human is inherently slow and inefficient. This might explain why tech executives like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, reportedly view raising a child as a “waste of energy.” To a mind obsessed with optimization, a data center is valuable because it generates economic value and profits. Childrearing is seen as a “waste” because it doesn’t produce a profit margin. But that “waste” is exactly where the meaning of life lives. This perspective reveals a fundamental misjudgment of what the bond between a parent and child actually is. Not all our relationships are transactional. Intimacy and co-creation are the very foundations of being human. The question we should be asking is: who benefits from returning us to “productive” work faster? If capitalism once sought to own our working hours, it now seeks to monetize our off-the-clock intimacy. In many parts of the world, where the friction between life-making and profit-making becomes unbearable, people are pushing back by abstaining from life-making altogether. Until we as a society align our values with our daily practices, no amount of robots or AI can resolve these tensions. We will continue to hollow out our homes and our sense of self until we face the fact that we don't live to work; we work to sustain the 'wasteful,' beautiful labor of life-making. Until next times, Kiang Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

15. 

    27 Feb 2026

    The Automation of Housework: Beyond the Spectacle

    Dear Friends, We are still living deep inside the fog of AI hype. It’s a haze that has generated enormous excitement, but also a fair share of illusions—fantasies about what’s actually possible today versus what remains decades out of reach. These myths have spilled over into the world of robotics. In this edition, I want to pull back the curtain on the ‘robot butler.’ We’ll look at why humanoid robots are stuck in a strange halfway state: they exist, yet they are perpetually ‘not quite ready.’ We’ll also explore why the automation of housework, at least as it’s being sold to us, is really just a new form of unpaid labor. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Personal Is Political Guess how excited I was the first time I saw a picture of a robot folding laundry? Honestly, I was more thrilled by that single image than by watching an entire army of Unitree robots perform martial arts at the 2026 Lunar New Year Festival. As a stay-at-home dad, nothing would make my day more than offloading the “dull and boring work”—the loading, unloading, and folding—so I could spend that time reading books to or playing with my kids. But that pipe dream burst quickly. The truth is, humanoid robots capable of completing household chores don’t exist yet. They struggle outside of "strictly controlled environments," which is really just code for a home without humans. Take the Figure robot, for example, the humanoid robot named one of the best innovations of 2025 by Time Magazine (https://time.com/7324233/figure-03-robot-humanoid-reveal/). Even though Figure 03 is technically “available” to buy, it is still fully tele-operated . Yes, they require humans to operate them (ridiculous). Yes, they rely on household data to train them further (obnoxious). And no, thank you, for me. In an interview with Time Magazine, the CEO of Figure said it would take almost two years for the robots to be ready and at least ten years before robots become common in our homes. Why all the noise now? This is not simply overpromising to attract the trillions of dollars needed to speed up development. The public rollout of these machines has become part of the strategy of robotization itself. It resembles what Leopoldina Fortunati and colleagues (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12369-020-00732-y) call the “roboid” phase of social robots: a long but increasingly normalized period between prototyping and full commercialization. With a few exceptions, like the Onero H1 (which is also considered not a viable product by one observer (https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/i-watched-a-robot-slowly-and-inefficiently-load-laundry-at-ces/)), they exist in an in-between stage, constantly needing more data mining and undergoing training, much like today’s generative AI. Even so, this is precisely where the conversation needs to begin. Our homes are too important to be shaped solely by the priorities of tech startups, especially when the question of whether housework can, or should, be automated remains highly political. Housework Technology: The Historical Afterthought Feminist scholars like Judy Wajcman have long argued that domestic technology is treated as an afterthought in the history of innovation. Machines like rice cookers, vacuum cleaners, washers, and dryers have existed for generations. Yet technologies associated with cooking and cleaning—work historically relegated to women—have seen remarkably little transformation, limited mostly to incremental upgrades. Even when domestic technologies advance, the so-called Cowan paradox remains: housework does not shrink. Instead, it expands. As the authors of After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time observe, innovation in the domestic sphere has tended to follow technical constraints and profit incentives rather than the actual needs of users. More often, innovation favors autonomous “leisure” activities over the persistent drudgery of care. Houseworkers, mostly women, are often expected to use their “freed up” time to perform more intensive emotional labor. In short, household technologies have not reduced the total time spent on daily domestic work. While humanoid robots may be years away, the domestic sphere is already partially mechanized. Over the past few decades, the “digital revolution” has reshaped home life through software, algorithms, and voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. Consequently, houseworkers now carry a heavier mental load in organizing and managing these household devices. Unpaid Training as the New Care Work The robotization of the housework does more than just ask us to surrender our privacy to enrich Silicon Valley; it demands that domestic workers and caregivers perform a new form of invisible, unpaid labor. Across the globe, the lion’s share of reproductive labor falls to unpaid household members, including unmarried daughters and daughters-in-law, as well as exploited migrant workers. In a scenario set out by the big tech, these workers will become the ones “tweaking” and “fine-tuning” the machines, constantly picking up the slack where sensors fail. Instead of a “butler” robot that serves us, we have become the “tech support” staff for the hardware. In the 1970s, the Wages for Housework movement emerged from the feminist struggle to demand compensation for reproductive labor. Given these new trends of unpaid workers training and maintaining AI, it is only just that houseworkers revive this demand for the digital age. Until next time, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

16. 

    19 Feb 2026

    "Not a Single Robot" Without A Union Agreement

    Dear Friends, Following the previous post on companion robots, I stay with the issue of robots and workers in South Korea. This time, I return to a more familiar terrain: the introduction of robots on the shop floor and the struggle of unions to contest them. As Hyundai unveiled its humanoid Atlas at CES 2026, co-developed with its subsidiary Boston Dynamics, the demonstration gave us more than enough to feel uneasy. The response from the Hyundai Motor Union (HMU) was unequivocal: not a single robot without a labor-management agreement. This position reflects a long-standing confrontation between capital and labor, and it should not be mistaken for resistance to technology itself. The issue is not whether workers are willing to coexist with robots. Rather, the dispute signals a deeper concern over governance at the point of production. The question is whether technological change will be collectively negotiated or imposed unilaterally. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Labor Automation: Past and Present From the workers’ perspective, allowing management to introduce robots on the shop floor at will represents a decisive shift in the balance of power in industrial relations. In a context already shaped by platformization, extreme casualization, and weakened labor protections, unchecked automation threatens to further erode workers’ collective power. Seen this way, the debate over humanoid robots at Hyundai is not about human-robot interaction. It is about consent, power, and whether technological change will once again be mobilized as part of a broader strategy to discipline labor. This is a pattern with a long and instructive history in South Korea. By insisting that “not a single robot” may enter the production line without prior agreement, the union has invoked contractual clauses requiring management to notify workers of any new technology. In doing so, it has reactivated a regulatory mechanism: an attempt to slow down technological change through collective bargaining. Unlike the stationary robotic arms introduced in the 1990s, humanoid robots represent a qualitative shift: their mobility and dexterity. Workers recognize that this is not merely about job loss, but about the reorganization of work itself—one in which humans may increasingly be asked to switch the role with the machines. To understand why the union draws such a firm line, we need to situate the current confrontation within a longer history of labor struggle and technological discipline. Automation and Labor Militancy As labor historian Beverly Silver argues in Forces of Labor, waves of labor unrest tend to follow capital’s spatial and technological fixes. South Korea in the 1980s exemplified this dynamic. During the late 1980s—a period dubbed by Hagen Koo the “Great Workers’ Struggle”—the Korean state and capital launched coordinated offensives: violent military-style crackdowns were deployed to suppress militancy, and automation was introduced alongside efforts to flexibilize employment. The unrest itself was shaped by global restructuring. Automotive production had shifted from the United States and Japan to South Korea, driven by the expectation that an authoritarian developmental state would guarantee labor discipline. Instead, workers rose up. In 1987, more than 20,000 Hyundai workers occupied company plants, demanding independent and democratic unions. They forced Hyundai’s founder, Chung Ju-yung, to recognize their union. A dramatic reversal for a man who once declared there would be no union until the day he died. It was in this context that Hyundai Robot Industry was established in 1988, explicitly aimed at reducing reliance on a militant workforce. Automation was a strategic response to labor power. Labor militancy, then, was both a cause and a consequence of automation. Capital learned that neither relocation nor repression alone could contain workers’ resistance. Technology became embedded within a broader political project to reassert managerial control. Seen historically, robots have repeatedly entered the shop floor as instruments in struggles over power, discipline, and the terms of employment. The Battles Are In the Society Fast forward to 2026. Workers are once again facing a new cycle of capital offensives. This time it is amplified by societal hype around robots and AI. Observers of South Korean unions might dismiss the HMU as a “labor aristocracy”, as it is a union that still retains the privilege of collective bargaining. Many smaller, independent unions have far less leverage to negotiate over the introduction of robots. With the enactment of South Korea’s so-called “Yellow Envelope Law,” (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/p/reality-of-the-platform-labor-in) workers’ ability to challenge management decisions, including the deployment of robots, will become a litmus test for the recently reformed law itself. In my view, the struggle over who governs technology cannot be fought on the shop floor, or in the “workplace” alone, whatever that means in a given context. The future of work both in South Korea and across Asia will be shaped by what society is willing to contest and negotiate. Until next time, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

17. 

    9 Feb 2026

    Will Companion Robots Replace Care Workers in Aging Societies?

    Will Companion Robots Replace Care Workers in Aging Societies?Asian Labor Futures#29 What the Rise of Social Robots Reveals About Our Views On Migration Dear friends, In this edition, I turn to an issue much closer to my heart: care work. Over the past few years, we have seen a massive influx of resources poured into developing “social robots”. The AI hype cycle has catalyzed a boom in this sector. We are now seeing a mass commercialization of robotic and humanoid companions in 'advanced economies,' the challenges of demographic decline and the demands of healthcare are increasingly being placed onto machine. Aging Societies & Companion Robots In her 2025 novel Luminous, Silvia Park imagines a society where companion robots provide the intimacy and care that families no longer can. In Park’s world, humans, cyborgs, and robots live side by side, constantly confusing and mirroring one another. While set in a speculative, future unified Korea, the story feels uncannily close to our present—a moment where the lines between human care and programmed response are beginning to dissolve. In South Korea, ChatGPT-powered robots are a lived reality. Take, for instance, Hyodol: a doll-like robot designed with the persona of a seven-year-old. In November 2025, CNN (https://www.cnn.com/health/asias-aging-population-finds-comfort-care-in-robo-grandma-dolls-wellness-spc) reported that, over 12,000 Hyodol robots have been distributed through government and public welfare programs to elderly people living alone across South Korea. As reported by the Rest of World (https://restofworld.org/2025/korea-ai-robot-senior-care-hyodol/), the robots remind seniors to take medication and flag emergencies, but the connection goes deeper. Elders often speak to them as if they were real children, treating the machines as kin. (Hyodol recently entered the US market and is re-named Sunshine) Similarly, in Singapore, (https://www.channelnewsasia.com/today/big-read/ai-technology-elderly-care-active-ageing-5477456) a humanoid named Dexie leads nursing home residents in exercise and songalong, while elders are photographed hugging Paro, a Japanese robotic seal, or even co-authoring books with chatbots. Throughout Asia, we see this framed as ‘heartwarming innovation.’ Governments, stuck with a shrinking workforce, hope that AI can fix the care gap. They want machines to solve the labor crisis, and even loneliness itself. What Does Desires for Robots Reveal? For decades, thinkers have argued that automation could liberate us from drudgery. But under our current system, automation often serves a different master: it is used to cheapen and replace workers. This irony was on full display at the trade fair CES 2026, where Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (https://www.fairfieldsuntimes.com/news/national/nvidia-ceo-praises-robots-as-ai-immigrants/article_570a9bf6-6d77-5f48-bf94-6ebb63f47514.html) described robots as “AI immigrants” designed to “compensate for labor losses.” This framing is revealing: it posits the “ideal” worker as a being that is endlessly productive and entirely devoid of rights—no family to support, no grievances, and no need for rest or days off. In practice, this techno-fix is rarely an end in itself. As one study on Hyodol from East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal argues: “The introduction of the care robot at the welfare institutions does not make their elderly care work unmanned, nor does the robot substitute for human caregivers. Instead, it displaces and redistributes the caregivers’ tasks and responsibilities, leading to multiple eldercare practices—tactile, digital, proximate, remote.” Shin, H., & Jeon, C. (2024). The Robotic Multi-Care Network: A Field Study of a “Robot Grandchild” in South Korea. 18(2), 177–195. Chihyung Jeon at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, a co-author of the Hyodol study, argues in his essay, “A Good Life in Asia with Robots?” (2016), that the pursuit of robotics is less a technological quest than a mirror reflecting the deep-seated anxieties and political choices of South Korean and Japanese societies. According to Jeon, this fascination reveals a “collective unwillingness” to engage in difficult dialogues about intractable social issues like aging and inequality. For societies with a deep-seated aversion to foreign migration—both culturally and at the policy level—it is often seen as easier to “build rather than import new citizens”. In this perview, robots are positioned as a convenient "clean and simple way out," promising to solve labor shortages while bypassing the "tensions and frictions" inherent to human integration. This logic has a clear historical precedent. Former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe (2006–2007; 2012–2020) famously championed robot development as a pillar of his Innovation 25 Agenda. His goal was to use robotization to tackle a shrinking demography and labor force while intentionally avoiding the need for immigration. It was a techno-optimist vision of a self-sustaining society that didn’t welcome outsiders. However, anthropologist and historian Jennifer Robertson, author of Robo Sapiens Japanicus, argues this nationalistic project in Japan has historically failed in both counts. It neither encouraged women to have more children nor stopped the need for foreign labor. As she recently told DM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Omt0-NxBsg), Japan is finally being forced to become a “nation of immigration.” Machines could not replace the infrastructure that care requires. Labor as Ghosts in the Machine In my research on migrant care workers along the Myanmar-Thailand migration corridor—a project with sociologist Pei Palmgren funded by Stanford—we look at the care crisis through the eyes of the workers themselves. Currently, migrant workers are forced to absorb the costs of a care system that states have abandoned. They care for Thai elders and expat children while navigating precarious legal status, healthcare gaps, and the threat of harassment. Against this backdrop, robotic care doesn’t look like an alternative to exploitation—it looks like an extension of it. This brings us to a fundamental question for our future: What happens when we turn a basic human need into a subscription service? My research suggests this trend will likely deepen global inequality. We are moving toward a bifurcated future: “advanced” societies may use machines to automate care, while migrant workers remain essential in places where such technology is out of reach. Even in wealthy societies like South Korea and Singapore, the need for human labor will not disappear—it will simply become more invisible and precarious. In Luminous, the robots are haunted by a 'ghost in the machine', a flicker of sentience that blurs the line between the organic and the programmed. To me, this ghost reflects the very humanity we deny to living care workers today. We look for comfort from the machine because we’ve rendered human care labor invisible. As long as care is treated as a “cost” to be minimized rather than a foundation to be shared, technological fixes will only sharpen inequality and sense of isolation. What we require is not a better robot, but a political reimagining of care as a collective infrastructure and a fundamental public good. Until we confront the social relations of labor, the future of care will remain haunted—by the workers it renders invisible, and by the lives it refuses to value. Until next time, Kriangsak (Kiang) Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

18. 

    31 Jan 2026

    Resilience: The Anatomy of Survival

    Dear friends, Back in September (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/p/building-workers-movement-like-a), I wrote about “Growing Movements like A Tree,” and the patient work of building unions in South Korea and Indonesia. But as I’ve deepened my analysis of platform labor activism, I want to push the analogy further. In many sectors of the gig economy, the soil is too dry and the algorithmic pruning too frequent for deep roots to take hold. If we judge these movements by the logic of the trees, they look like failures. In this edition, turning to the work of botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, I want to suggest a “moss logic” for making sense of labor organizing in the informal economy. My understanding is shifting, and I invite you to shift with me. This shift to a moss analogy has required me to unlearn my own biases about what power looks like. This is a deepening of the emergent strategy I’ve been exploring, and an attempt to offer a new way of understanding labor struggles at these new frontiers. Here is what the biology of moss teaches us about resilience and adaptation. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. When Centers Do Not Hold In my post on Organizing Strategy from the Margins (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/p/organizing-strategy-from-the-margins), I argued that workers at the “margins” adopt different ways of organizing. Moss could offer deeper insights into this. Ecologists call moss a “pioneer species.” It is the first life to colonize bare rock, disaster sites, and hidden places where nothing else can grow. Platform worker organizing similarly emerges precisely where traditional labor organizing cannot take root: where there is no shared workplace and no protection from legal frameworks. Unlike trees, moss has no vascular system. Trees need complex plumbing to fight gravity and move water upward; without this rigid structure, moss cannot stand tall. Instead, it stays low to the ground, absorbing what it needs directly through its leaves. We must be careful not to romanticize this. Just as soil can be stripped of its richness, platform companies have terraformed the economy to be hostile to workers. Organizing emerges here not by choice, but by necessity. The infrastructures of care riders build mirror this anatomy. Without a centralized structure, mutual aid circulates directly from person to person. Because platforms refuse to provide safety nets, riders fund their own. Yet, while individual moss plants are fragile, a colony creates a humid microclimate that sustains the group. The gathering places of the gig economy such as “base camps'“ or community centers are where workers collectively generate the atmosphere of solidarity that makes individual survival possible. The Art of Waiting One of the hardest questions I raised in How to Sustain Our Movements (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/p/how-to-sustain-our-movements) is that of sustainability. How do we keep going no matter what happens? Moss has a superpower called poikilohydry. Unlike plants, which die if they dry out, moss can lose 95% of its water content and simply go dormant. It looks dead: crisp, brown, and fragile. But the moment moisture returns, it rehydrates and photosynthesizes immediately. Rather than seeing this as weakness, moss logic reveals it as an adaptation. This period of dormancy is not idleness; it is the time to slowly build the base. It is the patient work of accumulating the numbers, the trust, and the density required to withstand blowback. We wait not because we are afraid, but because we are gathering the critical mass necessary to exert pressure that cannot be ignored. We wait for the rain. We retreat and re-strategize. This quality troubles our conventional ways of understanding sustainability of movements. Finally, mosses learn to 'dwell in the boundary layer.' In nature, this is the zone just above the ground where wind velocity drops to zero. Riders and drivers have mastered this political boundary layer, inhabiting spaces where they maintain the critical work of learning and nurturing growth. Crucially, these are also the zones where they build allies with civil society organizations, strengthening the layer of their protection. Necessity Is The Mother of Adaptation In short, moss offers a masterclass in what adrienne maree brown calls emergent strategy: complex patterns arising from simplicity and the art of being small. It is important to state clearly: moss demonstrates a biology of resilience and adaptation. Moss is small because the environmental conditions allow for nothing larger. To praise the resilience of gig workers without seeing through the conditions that create the drought in the first place is a mistake. This framework is not a prescription for how the world should be; it is a description of how life survives when the ecosystem is broken. I find myself stepping away from the metaphor of the tree I used just five months ago. We need to stop looking for a forest of trees. We need to learn to recognize the resilience even when, to the untrained eye, it looks like defeat. Until next time, Kriangsak (Kiang) Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe (https://asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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