Drawing upon a study of the labor movement’s challenge to inequality in Los Angeles from 1992 to 2008, this chapter presents a critical analysis of the city as a site of solidarity. It shows how, to build local labor law, the labor movement must promote solidarity not just among workers but among different progressive movements, which become interlinked around campaigns to reshape low-wage work, while also promoting related goals: including immigrant inclusion, expanding affordable housing, and promoting environmental justice. As such, the chapter is fundamentally about the role of solidarity in efforts to build decentralized power in a political context where there is an absence of political opportunities for moving labor policy, specifically, and progressive social policy more generally at the national level. Building decentralized power as a way to rebuild labor law, this chapter suggests, requires conceptualizing solidarity as a local, city-wide project, with two related components: one is inter-movement solidarity, which is solidarity between labor and allied movements; and the other is intra-movement solidarity, which is solidarity among workers fighting for better lives. The chapter argues that, while both visions of solidarity are necessary to build local labor reform, there are tensions between the two that must always be managed.

Japan has long been portrayed as a distinctively uniform society both racially and culturally despite the firm reality that it has many social groups that are subjected to discrimination and prejudice in ethnic and quasi-ethnic terms. This chapter first examines a few aspects of Japan’s ethnocentrism and then addresses the fallacy of the homogeneity thesis by delineating four ‘minority groups’ in Japan: the indigenous Ainu, burakumin, resident Koreans, and foreign workers. Based on the analysis of minority issues, the latter part of the chapter calls into question the monocultural definition of ‘Japaneseness’ and explores multiple ways of defining ‘the Japanese’.