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In the early 1990s, as the recession initiated by the bursting of the Japanese asset price bubble became protracted, Japanese companies started to abandon the particularly “Japanese” form of management that they had formerly employed and look for new management methods. As a part of such new operative strategies, companies employed more temporary workers and increased outsourcing, which radically increased their use of external employees. As a result, the problem of temporary workers, the breadth and seriousness of which greatly increased throughout the so-called Lost Decade following the asset price collapse and the Koizumi administration’s structural reforms, cast a deep shadow over Japan’s society and its economy. Since the late 2000s, scholars have pointed to the rapid increase of temporary workers as contributing to the exacerbation of the problems of the “gap society” and the “working poor.” Scholars see more temporary workers as contributing to the gap society and the working poor because this class is exposed to substandard working conditions, including compensation that typically does not rise greatly above the minimum wage level. While temporary workers themselves could theoretically seek to improve their working conditions through collective action, such a solution is not realistic in light of the low level of labor union membership in this class. Thus, governmental intervention is crucial to solving the wage problem for temporary workers. Several proposals have been expounded for solving this problem through legal policy means: expanding social security coverage, educating temporary workers to increase their ability to meaningfully contribute to the company, and raising minimum wage. These policies should be implemented in tandem in order to produce the optimal result, but the most direct solution is raising the minimum wage. Article 9 of Japan’s Minimum Wage Act says that regional minimum wages must be determined taking into consideration “the cost of living and the wages of workers and the capacity of normal industries to pay wages in the region.” Thus, the cost of living is a factor to be taken into account in setting the minimum wage. However, minimum wageamounts as heretofore established have not been enough to cover even the most basic cost of living, which is why laborunions have continuously called for a minimum wage that is “at least enough to allow the recipient to enjoy the most basic health and cultural benefits.” Such demands are broadly called the “living wage” movement. However, despite a noticeable increase made during the last 5years as a result of the movement, the minimum wage still does not match the basic cost of living necessary for maintaining humandignity. As the governmental policy of meeting the basic cost of living by raising the minimum wage failed to produce a meaningful result, labor unions began to search for a new solution at the local level, called the “public contracts ordinance enactment” movement. Public contracts ordinance refers to the local ordinance that requires private contractors who are awarded governmental construction projects or obtain a contract in open bidding to pay a higher wage than the minimum wage to the employees working on such projects. In the 1990s, labor unions have actively developed a movement to implement this ordinance, and such movement started to produce tangible results by the 2000s. This study attempts to examine the change in Japanese labor movement since the 1990s and the local communities’ response to the movement by looking at the background, the significance, the process and the results of such movement through case studies from Noda, Chiba and Kawasaki, Kanakawa.