Amado Uno: New APALA Director Passionate About His Work

Amado Uno got an early start as a union movement activist—he was about five years old at the time. As he recalls it:

I was with my aunt on a picket line. I was helping out. She was a teacher in the Oakland Unified School District, and I learned that picket lines were not to be crossed.

Once on a picket line, Uno never turned back. Today, he’s the executive director of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), the AFL-CIO constituency group for Asian and Pacific Islander American workers. Uno was named executive director in March.

The union movement has been an integral part of his life. His mother, whose parents came from Guam, organized health care and home care workers for years and now works for Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums. Uno’s father was the first mainland-born Japanese American to be elected business manager of an Electrical Workers local. They met in the anti-Vietnam War movement and have been involved in progressive causes ever since—along with their son. Says Uno:

I remember going to rallies and picket lines with my parents before I could walk.

While in college, Uno signed up with IBEW Local 595, his dad’s local, and worked during summers as an electrician—”running house wires in West Oakland.”

After he got his degree in American Studies, Uno became an organizer for California’s Universal Preschool Initiative, took part in Ron Dellums’ successful campaign to become Oakland’s mayor and worked for the Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote, which builds civic engagement in the API [Asian Pacific-Island] community.

When he was hired by APALA and returned to the union movement last year, he describes it as

a homecoming I embraced. It was very comforting.

Uno says his two top priorities at APALA are organizing and political action. When APALA was founded in 1992:

there were just a handful of API union organizers. I’ve heard stories that you could count them on two hands.

APALA has changed all that in recent years by holding annual organizing institutes to recruit and train a new generation of API organizers. The intensive, three-day program, modeled on the successful AFL-CIO Organizing Institute, builds the ranks of API organizers in the movement, says Uno but also encourages Asian Pacific Islanders to take leadership roles in the union movement.

Organizers who understand their own communities, know about the Asian diaspora, and have the language proficiency to help these workers join our movement.

And it’s not just our own communities. API organizers can go to any region of the country and help any workers to organize.

Uno notes that APALA’s program Every Vote Counts already has mobilized API union members in four states during the 2008 primary campaigns and will add three more during the general election.

The challenge is that APIs are largely left on the margins. It’s no secret that we have some of the lowest voter registration and participation rates in the country. The political parties and major candidates don’t actively target API union members. There are sophisticated programs to encourage participation by others. That’s absent for us.

It’s a real challenge to engage our community—and it’s a real opportunity.

Nine months after Uno was hired as APALA’s deputy director and two months after he was promoted to director, Uno recounts a lesson he learned years ago from his father.

My father once said that you have your job and your work. Your job is what you do to sustain your life and pay your bills, and your work is what you do to feed your soul, like helping the homeless or advocating for youth or registering low-income voters.

I feel blessed to be where I am. I can do what I’m passionate about and be compensated for it.

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