labor – Asian American / Asian Research Institute

Desire Paths & Han: Scholar Activism with NYC’s Immigrant Food Delivery Workers

February 21, 2024February 16, 2024 By Do Jun Lee

In recent years, New York City’s food delivery workers, a largely Asian and Latina/o immigrant workforce, have struggled against being characterized and policed as public safety “problems” even as these same workers became essential but unprotected during the Covid-19 pandemic. To better unpack the temporality of desire paths of delivery workers, Prof. Do Jun Lee mobilizes han, an indigenous Korean word for the inherited and collective emotions of transgenerational trauma from systematic oppressions. As such, understanding how and why food delivery workers are simultaneously “essential” and a “problem” is to re-member the intertwined and complex histories of place, migrations, mobilities, labor, and governance, which opens up possibilities for redefining the “problem.”

Globalized Filipino Activism: Resisting Neoliberalism and State Repression in Diaspora

December 15, 2023 By Jackelyn Mariano

Jackelyn Mariano will discuss her research and community activism among diasporic Filipino social movements, particularly the Malaya Movement’s broad anti-fascist coalition building during the Philippine elections, and the Justice for Jollibee Workers campaign that has challenged the fast-food corporation’s systemic abuse of workers’ rights.

Celebrating Our Roots – Panel Discussion to Honor the 40th Anniversary of the 1982 Chinatown Garment Worker Rallies

October 24, 2022October 19, 2022 By AAARI

Panel speakers will share personal stories about growing up with sewing mothers and grandmothers during the decades when practically every Chinese immigrant family in New York City included garment factory workers – the hard work and long hours, the social environment and friendships, union benefits and programs, and the strength, solidarity and activism of the immigrant women workers. Speakers will discuss how they teach this history and legacy to new generations.

Asian American Workers Rising: APALA’s Struggle to Transform the Labor Movement

November 15, 2023October 26, 2021 By Kent Wong

Join co-editor Kent Wong, and panelists Alex Hing, May Ying Chen, and Marian Thom to discuss Asian American Workers Rising, a new book that celebrates the first thirty years of the Asian Pacific Labor Alliance (APALA), AFL-CIO, the first national Asian and Pacific Islander (AAPI) worker organization within the U.S. labor movement.

Mapping Covid-19’s Transnational Implications for Women Workers

March 17, 2021July 6, 2020 By Lee Xie

“We [women in the United States] are the majority of the population, majority of the electorate, majority of the workforce… and yet we’re still doing [the] majority of family unpaid or low paid labor.” — Ai-jen Poo TODAY IS JUNE 30, 2020. More than 125,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus; globally, half a million … Read more

‘Be Still and Do Not Move’: The Covid-19 Migrant and the Ministry of the Soul

December 19, 2024June 2, 2020 By Vinay Lal

FOR GENERATIONS, IN INDIA AND AROUND THE WORLD, school teachers in classrooms have struggled to contain the impulse that children have to move around. Hundreds of psychologists, on the hunt for explanations for the comparatively poor performance of boys in schools, and their apparently increasing disdain for formal education, allege that children, and boys in … Read more