The Arab uprisings brought to the fore basic questions about contentious politics in the Arab World. It vivified questions about the complex role of labour and social movements in the basic dynamics of change. In Lebanon, the labour movement was able to set up institutions and practices that managed to improve working and living conditions, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s. Following the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990, the labour movement was strongly undermined by state policies. Since 2011 and the onset of the Arab uprising, it has shown signs of revival, especially with the sustained mobilisation of public sector employees demanding a new salary scale that was partially approved in 2017. In parallel, Lebanon witnessed in the summer of 2015 a series of demonstrations and sit-ins organized by a group of civil society organizations against the government for its failure to develop a long-term waste management strategy. As demonstrations continued, these demands expanded to express the need to change the political system in place. In this context, the paper aims at studying labor and social mobilizations during this period while it examines the assault of neo-liberal policies on labour as well as strategies of the government apparatus to repress protests and movements. What did cause this turnaround? What marks the distinctiveness of these movements when compared with those of the reconstruction period? In terms of research design, this study relies on conventional process tracing and the construction of a detailed timeline of major process events through content analysis of governmental documents and articles and op-eds in the major media, and interviews with pivotal policy actors from government, trade unions and issue experts. The paper explores the impact of neoliberal policies on the structure and trajectory of labour mobilizations in Lebanon and their movements for change. The paper also focuses attention on neo-liberal globalization’s repercussions on social mobilizations through professional practices of political aid.