As authoritarianism rises globally and progressive movements face intensifying pressure, the strategic case for alliance-building has never been clearer. In this four-part series, Building Alliances, Networks & Coalitions, we hear from organisers creating a different model of how movements coordinate, build collective power, and hold together across scale. We’ll explore what their work looks like in practice, along with the successes and the challenges and how to build sufficient coherence and cohesion to achieve their goals.
If you’re interested in how to build a strategic coherence, coordinate across scale, and how networks stay accountable, then this series is for you!
19 March – Coordinating Workers’ Movements with Asia Monitor Resource Centre
Ye Yint is one of a team of six who make up the Asia Monitor Resource Center (AMRC), a 50-year-old labor NGO supporting labour movements across 16 countries through a network of over 130 partners. Collectively speaking multiple languages to bridge cultures and contexts in service of workers’ rights, they support grassroot organizations from across Asia Region (SEA, SA, EA) to collaborate by providing the infrastructure for solidarity across borders, culture and languages to create coordinated human rights campaigns.
Using relational organising practices, their cross-border campaigns are conducted through three key programmes: Organising the marginalised for social protection; advocating worker participation to promote sustainable development to ensure responsible deployment of capital; and ensuring occupational health and safety is prioritised and environmental health and safety is promoted in the context of climate change.
In this conversation, we’ll explore how they coordinate and build alliances across such a large and diverse network, from check-in calls, building trust, creating space for people to work through tensions, and showing up to other struggles whilst navigating power differences and culture-clashes, balancing between building trust and speaking truth to power, prioritising pedagogy over policing, and staying accountable to grassroots movements while coordinating internationally. We’ll discuss how organisers across the region practice mutuality, navigate difference, and build lasting infrastructure for solidarity.
NOTE DIFFERENT START TIME: Ye will be joining us from Seoul, Korea, and so this session will start at 12 noon.