Remembering Kent Wong (1956-2025)
Wong was an educator, organizer and visionary who saw immigrants as the heart of the labor movement—long before the idea had reached the mainstream.
Gregory Mantsios
As was his way, Kent Wong was abundantly generous when he spoke about the characteristics and accomplishments of kindred spirits. He was like that with me. He saw strengths in me that I didn’t see in myself. I once joked, “I want you, my dear friend, to write my obituary.” Kent, six years younger than me, passed away on October 8, 2025. He was sixty-nine years old.
While he was known for his warmth, laughter, and expansive generosity toward friends and comrades, he was also a sharp critic — especially of the rich and powerful and those complicit with them. He devoted his life to advancing the interests of the disenfranchised and his efforts and influence extended across movements, generations, and continents.
Kent Wong was a towering figure in labor education. He served as Director of the UCLA Labor Center for more than three decades. There he taught courses on labor and social justice; authored and edited works on immigrant rights and nonviolent social movements; and built pioneering programs that empowered immigrant workers, nurtured young leaders, and fostered international solidarity. Under his leadership, the UCLA Labor Center became a national model for labor education and movement building.
Through his advocacy, Kent led the effort to secure state legislative funding for a state-wide network of centers in the University of California system that are now dedicated to labor research, education, and advocacy. He also played a critical role in establishing the United Association for Labor Education (UALE), a national organization that brings together both academic and union-based labor educators and galvanized it to reflect the values, diversity, activism, and democratic spirit that stand as a lasting testament to his life’s work.
As an organizer, Kent helped forge labor – community coalitions that placed immigrant workers at the heart of the labor movement and helped transform the political landscape of Los Angeles. A bridge-builder and strategist, he viewed coalition work as both an organizing method and a moral imperative. Through his leadership at the UCLA Labor Center, he advanced campaigns among car wash workers, day laborers, garment and domestic workers, training new organizers, and giving public legitimacy to their struggle for dignity and rights.
New Labor Forum readers knew Kent as a founding member of the journal’s Editorial Board and a frequent contributor to its pages. From its inception, he helped shape the journal’s identity, pushing us to serve as a bridge between academics and activists on the ground. He championed authors and themes that were unpopular in the mainstream labor movement at the time: the centrality of immigrant workers, the necessity of confronting racism within the labor movement, and the urgency of breaking with the AFL-CIO’s lingering legacy of Cold War nationalism — long before it became acceptable to do so.
Kent saw immigrant workers not as participants but as the new vanguard — the moral and organizational heart of labor’s renewal. Through essays like “Don’t Miss the Bus” (2004) and “The 2006 Immigrant Uprising” (2007), he examined how Latino and Asian workers — janitors, housekeepers, garment, and home care workers — revitalized unions and recast labor’s struggle as a fight for civil and human rights. In his New Labor Forum interviews with figures such as John Wilhelm and Dolores Huerta, he invited leaders to imagine how immigrant organizing could reset labor’s moral compass and expand solidarity across borders.
Equally bold were his writings on international labor. From “Blaming It All on China” (2004) to “Worker to Worker, Union to Union” (2022), he challenged Cold War assumptions within the AFL-CIO and rejected the scapegoating of foreign workers for the ravages of globalization. He argued that inequality stemmed not from China, Vietnam, or Mexico but from the unchecked power of multinational corporations — and that labor’s future depended on international collaboration, not isolation.
Kent organized a dozen or more delegations of labor leaders and educators to foreign countries, most of them to China and Vietnam to meet with Chinese (ACFTU) and Vietnamese (VGCL) unions. These exchanges opened rare channels of dialogue between workers across continents. They examined shared challenges posed by globalization, corporate power, and changing labor laws, while fostering mutual learning about organizing strategies and worker education. For Kent, these delegations embodied international solidarity in practice: not symbolic gestures, but direct relationships that redefined labor internationalism as a strategic collaboration among workers across borders.
With his writing and his worker-to-worker, union-to-union exchanges, Kent reframed solidarity as strategy: direct cooperation among workers and unions capable of confronting global capital. He pointed to tangible results — coordination between dockworkers in Los Angeles and Shanghai, joint organizing around Walmart, and project-labor agreements with Chinese firms that yielded union contracts and good jobs in Los Angeles. Through such work, he made internationalism tangible — a global instrument of worker power.
At the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies (SLU), Kent was a treasured colleague and collaborator. In addition to his work on our journal, he was a frequent panelist at our public programs providing valuable insight and global perspective. Kent Wong played a key role in SLU’s Advancing the Field of Labor Relations (ALR) Project, which built partnerships with labor educators and labor organizations in China and Vietnam. Through faculty and student exchanges, curriculum development, and translation of teaching materials, the project fostered cross-national collaboration to expand labor education and promote worker participation in civil society. Kent’s knowledge, experience, and diplomatic skills were central to our effort.
Taken together, Kent Wong’s life and work constitute a remarkable legacy of vision and integrity. He built bridges — between labor and the academy, between immigrant and native-born workers, between nations long divided by ideology. He challenged labor to live up to its ideals, to confront its racism and nationalism, and to imagine solidarity as something larger than any single movement or country. And he did so not as an abstract theorist but as a tireless organizer, educator, and friend.
To those of us who were fortunate enough to know him, Kent embodied the best of what the labor movement can be: principled, joyful, fearless, and profoundly committed to a better and more just world. Kent’s loss is so deeply painful to so many of us. His generosity, grace, courage, and intellect will be missed. Yet his legacy lives on in the countless people he taught, mentored, and inspired. We honor him best by continuing the work he began — building movements grounded in dignity, solidarity, and hope.
Gregory Mantsios is the founding Dean of the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and the founder and publisher of New Labor Forum.
