Asian Labor Futures Podcast

Kriangsak T., PhD
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  • Politics
  • Updated Biweekly

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

  1. Jul 31

    The Unglamorous Labor of Movement Building

    (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 Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

  2. Jun 23

    We Aren't All Samsung Workers

    (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 Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Jun 9

    One Year of Asian Labor Futures: the New Chapter

    Dear friends, This July, Asian Labor Futures turns one, and this milestone alone deserves reflection and recognition. When I first launched this Substack, I didn't have a complete roadmap. To be completely honest, I still don’t. Up until now, I’ve treated this space as a conduit for my curiosity and creativity. It has been an invaluable space for me to hone public communication skills and connect fragments of thoughts. I only have a few paid subscribers, all of whom I know personally, and I want to sincerely thank their foundational support. Also, to every single person who has left a comment, shared a post, or engaged in solidarity: I really appreciate you! In this post, I want to take a moment to look back at what this year of writing has brought me and share some exciting updates about where Asian Labor Futures is heading next. Asian Labor Futures is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Groundedness and Gratitude Every now and then, I succumbed to the platform’s algorithmic nudges—the seductive idea of rapid growth or generating a steady stream of income. But reality has a way of grounding us. I have felt that Substack’s libertarian vibe is a poor fit for “my people”. Moreover, its algorithm seems designed to keep creators busy with superficial chitchat rather than focusing on substantive work. This is a social platform inherently at odd with my worker-centric, movement-building approach. Lately, subscriber count has plateaued, and despite being here for almost a year, I have learned very little about who my readers actually are. Despite these roadblocks, building this Substack has both deepened my thinking and reshaped other areas of my work. My favorite pieces to write are those that cross-pollinate ideas, like blending adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy or Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work on moss ecology with my own research on labor activism. This synthesis has led to breakthroughs in how I understand adaptation and resilience, both in grassroots organizing and organizational structure. I hope these insights offer some value to you. I recently wrapped up the “Reimagining Asian Labor Futures” course with the Asian Labor School, while many early posts have become central discussion points for Season 3 of the Continent of Resistance podcast—my collaborative project that I have been a co-producer and co-host since 2024. I can’t wait for the new season to be available! The Next Chapter This July also marks a significant milestone for me. I am wrapping up my Just Tech fellowship, bringing an incredible two-year journey to a close. As I prepare for the next chapter in my personal and professional life, I’m also excited to share that applications for the next cohort are officially open! 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 Get full access to Asian Labor Futures at asianlaborfutures.substack.com/subscribe

  4. May 30

    Spirituality, AI, and Illusion of Separation

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

  5. May 14

    Who's Steering Our "Driverless" Future?

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

  6. May 2

    The Scaffolding of Allyship

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

  7. Apr 21

    Reimagining Asian Labor Futures Begins

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

  8. Apr 10

    Oil Crisis and Rage in South and Southeast Asia

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

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About

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

Information

  • Creator
    Kriangsak T., PhD
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    15
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Kriangsak Teerakowitkajorn
  • Show Website
    Asian Labor Futures Podcast