Asian Labor Futures Podcast

(A section of Rice Riot Poster by the Japanese A3BC 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). 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” 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

(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, 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 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), 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 collective. When ruangrupa introduced the Indonesian agrarian practice of lumbung (referred to a communal rice barn) as the core framework for documenta fifteen 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 and here.

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

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

(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, 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 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), 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 collective. When ruangrupa introduced the Indonesian agrarian practice of lumbung (referred to a communal rice barn) as the core framework for documenta fifteen 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 and here.

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

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

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

(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, 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 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

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

(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, 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 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

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

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

(Photo by Shwetha Shankar on Unsplash)

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

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

(Photo by Shwetha Shankar on Unsplash)

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

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

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

(Photo by Sung Jin Cho on Unsplash)

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, with 45,000 employees prepared to launch a 18-day strike 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 to avert a prolonged dispute and feared national and global crises. Ultimately, the company signed a deal 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 in combined bonuses this year.

Sensationalism aside, the media still paints AI as an incredible money-printing 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—where technical and office workers are organized under the militant Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) and full-time production workers are affiliated 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. In fact, the KCTU 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

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

(Photo by Sung Jin Cho on Unsplash)

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, with 45,000 employees prepared to launch a 18-day strike 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 to avert a prolonged dispute and feared national and global crises. Ultimately, the company signed a deal 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 in combined bonuses this year.

Sensationalism aside, the media still paints AI as an incredible money-printing 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—where technical and office workers are organized under the militant Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) and full-time production workers are affiliated 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. In fact, the KCTU 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

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

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

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! 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, 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

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