ABSTRACT
This collection takes as its starting point two earlier books on labour relations and their context in Hong Kong written by Bert Turner and his colleagues (Turner et al. 1980, 1991). The first study, which covered the 1970s, was requested and sponsored by a British Labour government’s Foreign and Commonwealth (FCO) Secretary, as an informal solution to pressure from the then politically influential British trade unions to investigate a supposed threat to employment for British workers in several industries because of ‘unfair competition’ from cheap and allegedly exploited labour in Hong Kong (Turner et al. 1991:1). The study was updated a decade later, with academic sponsorship, in the light of significant legal, economic, political and social changes The present book, focusing on the end of the 1990s, continues this tradition but widens the scope of the earlier work to include a greater emphasis on management issues in general, and on women in employment in particular, and also draws on the now considerable strength of home-grown university research in Hong Kong on labour markets, management policies and practices, and labour issues.
