The founding convention of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) held in Washington D.C. in May of 1992. The organization’s first president, Kent Wong, had proposed the idea of establishing a national organization of AAPI trade unionists years earlier to AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland with working as a staff attorney for the SEIU in Los Angeles. With the support of Kirkland, Wong travelled across the country to convene meetings with veteran AAPI labor activists, existing AAPI labor committees and other leaders from key unions with sizable Asian American memberships and plan for a national convention. Some 500 labor leaders attended the first convention of APALA, passing resolutions in support of immigrant rights, including an end to employer sanctions, and to create an Organizing Institute to recruit and train the next generation of AAPI organizers, a commitment to develop young worker activists that endures today. As Kent Wong described, the convention brought together AAPI activists with long histories in social justice movements:
“They were involved in the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War era, they were involved in the solidarity movements in support of Central American liberation struggles, they were in alliance with civil rights movements, and they had strong ties to Black, Latino/a, and Native American organizing. So in many ways, the group that came together was a culmination of decades of organizing within the broader AAPI movement. I think there was a tremendous strength in these initial founders who had been drawn to the labor movement based on a commitment to organizing the working class to fight for worker justice by challenging corporate abuse and the very oppressive conditions facing workers, especially communities of color and immigrants.”
Kent Wong in Asian American Workers Rising: APALA’s Struggle to Transform the Labor Movement . ed. Kent Wong, Matthew Finucane, Tracy Lai, Kim Geron, Emmelle Israel, and Julie Monroe. UCLA Center