Across Southeast Asia, millions of workers cross borders carrying skills and contributions that too often dissolve at the checkpoint — unrecognized, untransferable, lost. At the 29th ASEAN Labour Ministers Meeting in Bangkok this August, Cambodia's labour minister Heng Sour pressed the region to treat human qualifications as durable currency: portable across borders, legible to any employer, and anchored to social protections that follow the worker rather than the nation. The vision is coherent and the declarations are signed, but the deeper labour of harmonizing ten distinct national systems