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....

(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 notici...

(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....

(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 p...

(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....

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...

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...

(original photo by Hoseung Han on Unsplash ; edited by myself) Dear friends, In March, I wrote about Baidu’s Apollo Go 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 . Mea...

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...

(Photo by Oh Taeyeon on Unsplash ) 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 s...

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...

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...

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 upen...

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? Th...

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 r...

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 e...

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 secto...

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 movement...