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.

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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)

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