An organizer for the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates, Vy Nguyen has shown an untiring dedication to workers trying to stand up for their rights.

In 2002, Nguyen joined the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates as a New Voices Fellow. Based in Los Angeles, Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates works to build and empower a grassroots community of Korean and Latino community workers through leadership and network building. As organizers, they place a special emphasis on supermarket workers.

Nguyen’s passion for organizing is connected to her immigrant upbringing.

Nguyen was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, but her family fled to the United States as refugees of the Viet Nam War. She recalls her parents taking working class jobs and moving frequently. Eventually, she began thinking about how she could exert some sort of control over her life and community.

She found the answer while obtaining a literature degree at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). She began meeting long-time Asian-American activists and pioneers who had dedicated their lives to ensuring people's control over their own destinies through organizing. Inspired by her mentors, she became active in the student activist scene and began to see "to understand the world in terms of power and people and courage and change."

At the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates, Nguyen encountered several obstacles and challenges in her mission to organize, support, and advocate for immigrant workers. "A major one is how vulnerable undocumented immigrant workers are, how few rights they have in the U.S., and how much fear and distrust and doubt in their own power there is," she says. "Another obstacle that I'm constantly aware of is how inexperienced we organizers are and how we really are making it up as we go along. It's exciting and energizing, but sometimes it also scares me."

Using her exceptional strategic talents and determination, she has been able to garner a number of successes in organizing and assisting workers in Los Angeles. Focusing on Koreatown, she was instrumental in helping Latino, Korean and other workers organize to demand better working conditions at Assi, a local supermarket. When the supermarket retaliated against several workers by suspending their employment last August, she helped protesters raise more than $50,000 to support the suspended workers. In an effort to share the rich cultural and historical significance of Assi workers to the workplace and community, she wrote fact sheets and history booklets about their lives and histories.

"My philosophy is just to try to bring the people I work with to a place where they have the will, vision and tools to take leadership in whatever we are doing," she explains. She continues to advocate with the Los Angeles City Council to pass a resolution that would prohibit employers from using Social Security no-match letters to retaliate against immigrant workers. Employers routinely use the letters to discriminate against immigrant employees. She has also created a leadership development program for worker leaders and uses her Spanish speaking skills to forge links with and gain the trust of Latino workers.

Her single-minded goal is to expand her work organizing the workers in Koreatown's largest supermarket into the creation of that community's first labor union. "I've learned that it takes lifelong dedication not just to a job, but to a way of living," she says.