Asian and Asian American workers resist oppression and shape their own lives.

This book celebrates the first thirty years of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO (APALA), the first national Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) worker organization within the US labor movement. The voices in this book capture the spirit, determination, and commitment of a multiethnic, multigenerational group of AAPI labor activists who built a dynamic organization within the US labor movement to advance worker rights and labor solidarity. Included are founding members, emerging young activists who are charting a new path for AAPIs in labor, and the leaders who are no longer with us but who inspire others to continue their legacy.

The realities of globalization have produced a surprising reversal in the focus and strategies of labor movements around the world. After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South Korea and the United States. Using comparative historical inquiry and in-depth case studies, she shows how labor movements in countries with different histories and structures of economic development, class formation, and cultural politics embark on similar trajectories of change. Chun shows that as the base of worker power shifts from those who hold high-paying, industrial jobs to the formerly "unorganizable," labor movements in both countries are employing new strategies and vocabularies to challenge the assault of neoliberal globalization on workers' rights and livelihoods. Deftly combining theory and ethnography, she argues that by cultivating alternative sources of "symbolic leverage" that root workers' demands in the collective morality of broad-based communities, as opposed to the narrow confines of workplace disputes, workers in the lowest tiers are transforming the power relations that sustain downgraded forms of work. Her case studies of janitors and personal service workers in the United States and South Korea offer a surprising comparison between converging labor movements in two very different countries as they refashion their relation to historically disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and expand the moral and material boundaries of union membership in a globalizing world.

Introduction / David K. Yoo and Eiichiro Azuma -- Part I. Migration flows -- Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, and the American empire / Keith L. Camacho -- Towards a hemispheric Asian American history / Jason Oliver Chang -- South Asian America: histories, cultures, politics / Sunaina Maira -- Asians, native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders in Hawai'i: people, place, culture / John P. Rosa -- Southeast Asian Americans / Chia Youyee Vang -- East Asian immigrants / K. Scott Wong -- Asian Canadian history / Henry Yu -- Part II. Time passages -- Internment and World War II history / Eiichiro Azuma -- Reconsidering Asian exclusion in the United States / Kornel S. Chang -- The Cold War / Madeline Y. Hsu -- The Asian American movement / Daryl Joji Maeda -- Part III. Variations on themes -- A history of Asian international adoption in the United States / Catherine Ceniza Choy -- Confronting the racial state of violence: how Asian American history can reorient the study of race / Moon-Ho Jung -- Theory and history / Lon Kurashige -- Empire and war in Asian American history / Simeon Man -- Queer Asian American historiography / Amy Sueyoshi -- The study of Asian American families / Xiaojian Zhao -- Part IV. Engaging historical fields -- Asian American economic and labor history / Sucheng Chan -- Asian Americans, politics, and history / Gordon H. Chang -- Asian American intellectual history / Augusto Espiritu -- Asian American religious history / Helen Jin Kim, Timothy Tseng, and David K. Yoo -- Race, space, and place in Asian American urban history / Scott Kurashige -- From Asia to the United States, around the world, and back again: new directions in Asian American immigration history / Erika Lee -- Public history and Asian Americans / Franklin Odo -- Asian American legal history / Greg Robinson -- Asian American education history / Eileen H. Tamura -- Not adding and stirring: women's, gender, and sexuality history and the transformation of Asian America / Adrienne Ann Winans and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

Voices for Justice offers interviews, photos and personal testimony from ten Asian Pacific American union organizers representing a new generation of Asian Americans fighting for social and economic justice.