Asian Labor Futures Podcast

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,” 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

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

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 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, 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, 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 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, 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.

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

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 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, 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, 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 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, 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

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,

Back in September, 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, 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 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)

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,

Back in September, 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, 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 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

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