Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-07-14
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The fiftieth anniversary of the September 1973 coup d'état in Chile invites a reckoning that extends well beyond historical commemoration. At a moment when authoritarian consolidations are once again reshaping labor institutions across Latin America and beyond — from the erosion of collective bargaining rights in Brazil under successive administrations to the reorganization of public-sector unions in El Salvador — the Chilean case carries exceptional analytical weight. The article under consideration in *Latin American Perspectives*, which examines how the politico-economic and institutional architecture imposed by Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship between 1973 and 1990 continues to shape Chilean trade unionism, arrives at precisely the right historical juncture. More than a retrospective, it poses a question with immediate contemporary resonance: to what degree can a labor movement recover its organizational and political capacity when the institutional conditions of its subordination were engineered not merely to suppress collective action but to permanently restructure the terrain on which it occurs?
The centerpiece of the Pinochet regime's labor transformation was the Plan Laboral de 1979, drafted by José Piñera under the intellectual influence of the Chicago School economists who had already remade Chilean macroeconomic policy along neoliberal lines. The Plan Laboral was not simply a set of restrictive labor regulations; it was a constitutional reimagination of the relationship between capital, labor, and the state. It atomized collective bargaining by restricting negotiations to the firm level, eliminating the possibility of industry-wide or economy-wide agreements that had been foundational to Chilean labor politics since the early twentieth century. It restricted the right to strike in ways that made work stoppages functionally prohibitive, imposing replacement worker provisions that effectively neutered organized labor's primary instrument of leverage. And it fragmented union membership by permitting the multiplication of enterprise-level unions, destroying the capacity for horizontal solidarity that cross-sectoral federations had historically embodied. What the article traces, crucially, is that these institutional arrangements were not reversed with the return to democracy in 1990. The Concertación governments that followed, constrained by political pacts negotiated with the military and business elites during the transition, largely preserved the Pinochet-era labor framework even as they expanded social spending and moderated the most extreme aspects of the economic model. This created a paradox that has haunted Chilean labor politics for three decades: democratic governance without democratic industrial relations.
The implications of this institutional persistence are multidimensional and the article is careful to distinguish between formal and substantive recovery. In formal terms, Chilean trade unions did experience a partial revitalization after 1990, with rising membership rates and the gradual reconstruction of confederal structures under the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT). But in substantive terms, the structural constraints of the Plan Laboral meant that organized labor remained institutionally weak even as it regained a nominal presence in public life. Collective bargaining coverage remained among the lowest in the OECD. Real wages grew sluggishly relative to productivity gains. The proliferation of precarious and informal employment — a global phenomenon intensified in Chile by the outsourcing and subcontracting regimes that the labor code permitted — further eroded the organized sector's representational base. What is analytically significant here is that the article appears to locate the source of this weakness not primarily in the ideological choices of union leaders or the political alignments of labor confederations, but in the structural-institutional legacy of the dictatorship itself. This is an important theoretical contribution because it challenges explanations that attribute labor weakness in post-transition democracies primarily to globalization or to internal union failures, and instead foregrounds the enduring material consequences of authoritarian institutional design.
Connecting this analysis to broader trends in the political economy of development and ODA is both appropriate and illuminating. The international development community, including multilateral institutions, bilateral donors, and civil society organizations working in the labor rights space, has long grappled with the question of how to strengthen workers' organizations in contexts where the legal and institutional environment is structurally hostile. Chile presents a particularly instructive case because it exposes the limits of what might be called the "capacity-building" paradigm in labor rights promotion — the assumption that organizational training, leadership development, and improved union administration are sufficient to overcome structural disadvantages. When the fundamental architecture of collective bargaining is designed to prevent effective collective action, external support for union capacity can accomplish only so much. The article's implicit contribution to this debate is to suggest that genuine revitalization of the Chilean trade union movement — and by extension, labor movements operating under similarly restrictive inherited frameworks — requires not merely organizational strengthening but institutional reform at the level of labor law itself. This has direct policy implications for ODA programming in labor governance, which has at times prioritized soft-capacity interventions over the harder and more politically contentious work of supporting legal reform advocacy.
The emergence of new forms of worker mobilization in Chile — visible most dramatically in the social uprising of October 2019, the subsequent constitutional process, and the labor activism of non-traditional sectors including subcontracted workers in copper mining, platform delivery workers, and university staff — suggests that the revitalization referenced in the article's title is real but also fragile and contested. The 2019 uprising, which crystallized decades of accumulated grievance over inequality, pension inadequacy, and the cost of basic services, demonstrated that the Chilean working class retained significant mobilizational capacity even when formal union structures were weak. But it also revealed the organizational limits that the Plan Laboral had imposed: a social movement of extraordinary breadth struggled to translate its energy into durable institutional gains precisely because the labor movement lacked the confederal density and political centrality that might have channeled popular pressure into systemic reform. The failure of the first constitutional proposal in the September 2022 plebiscite, and the subsequent rightward shift in political discourse, underlines how contested the terrain of institutional transformation remains. For researchers and practitioners alike, the Chilean case after fifty years of authoritarian legacy argues powerfully that understanding labor's present requires taking its institutional past with the utmost seriousness — and that the work of democratic reconstruction in the sphere of industrial relations is neither automatic, nor complete, nor immune to reversal.