Over the past two decades, Hong Kong has been caught in the various dynamism of economic restructuring, political reversion to China and ‘late urbanism’, leading to a new constellation of social and industrial problems, which have been, so far, inadequately tackled by the government and by private businesses. Trade unions in Hong Kong face challenges to their conventional role, which are largely related to the rise of atypical employment and the increasingly transient nature of the workplace as a unit of work and employment. The present paper suggests that, in response to these adversities, trade unions in Hong Kong have taken strategic moves. There are emerging symptoms that the trade unions are restructuring and evolving a functional role in organising the neighbourhood community as a type of ‘third sector’ organisation outside and in parallel to their conventional occupational domain.
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