Rescaling labor movements in Japanese and US cities: Just-in-time, right-to-work, and a Foucauldian Theory of Scale

Debates over “constrained” labor agency open a chance to rethematize “scale” and “urban” in labor geographies. My work helps labor geography grasp how workers’ desire becomes a local locus of capitalist regulation and how this locus can constrain the labor movement into the form of grassroots counter-conducts engaged at the ground level. I analyze scales of labor movements and labor subjectivity in Japanese and US urban histories. These histories have nurtured just-in-time (Japan) and right-to-work (US), post-Taylorist technologies that stimulate workers’ desire to paralyze “labor’s spatial fix” and assist capital’s flexibility/mobility. Using Foucault’s scalar and urban imaginaries centering on the concept of security (power reconstruction through a population’s subjectivity), I explain how regimes as different as just-in-time and right-to-work developed comparable processes of workplace reformation, both “humanizing” capital’s flexibility/mobility into labor’s post-political desire for a workplace “without classes.” The urbanization of capital has developed such security-oriented workplaces to maximize labor’s consent to management. Urban capital circuits in space are assisted by security-oriented workplaces and the rescaled labor regulation these workplaces cultivate. The impetus of urban autonomy is unleashed vis-à-vis territorial power and converts (rescales) the state’s centripetal labor regulation into centrifugal, urbanized forms.