Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-07-15
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The fiftieth anniversary of Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état in Chile, which fell in September 2023, arrived at a moment of extraordinary global significance for the study of labor rights, democratic transition, and institutional resilience. Across the world, the relationship between authoritarian governance and organized labor has re-entered academic and policy discussions with renewed urgency, as governments from Southeast Asia to Latin America and Eastern Europe continue to deploy legal and institutional mechanisms to constrain collective bargaining, restrict union activity, and reconfigure the political economy in ways that benefit capital at the expense of workers. The Chilean case, examined in a recent article published in Latin American Perspectives, offers a uniquely rich lens through which to understand not merely the immediate effects of political repression on labor movements, but the long-term, path-dependent institutional consequences that outlast the authoritarian regimes that created them. Chile under Pinochet became a laboratory for neoliberal restructuring decades before the Washington Consensus codified its prescriptions for the developing world, and understanding how Chilean trade unionism has survived, adapted, and begun to revitalize itself in the post-dictatorship era is essential for development scholars, ODA practitioners, and civil society researchers who work in contexts where democratic backsliding and labor suppression intersect.
The core analytical contribution of the article lies in its rigorous examination of how the Plan Laboral of 1979, engineered under the Pinochet regime by labor minister José Piñera, fundamentally restructured the institutional architecture within which Chilean trade unions operate. The Plan Laboral was not simply a set of restrictive regulations; it represented a comprehensive effort to atomize collective action by limiting the scope of collective bargaining to the enterprise level, prohibiting solidarity strikes, restricting union membership in ways that fragmented worker representation, and creating legal frameworks that effectively displaced the organizational culture unions had built over decades of labor activism. What makes the Chilean case analytically distinctive is the deliberateness of this institutional engineering. Unlike regimes that suppressed unions primarily through brute force and later allowed a reversion to prior norms upon democratization, Pinochet's government embedded its labor framework in the 1980 constitution and in a legal order that proved extraordinarily durable. When the democratic transition came in 1990, incoming governments inherited not merely a weakened labor movement but an institutional scaffold designed to keep it weak. The article's exploration of this continuity — the way authoritarian legacies crystallized into legal and political norms that successive democratic governments struggled to dismantle — speaks directly to a central challenge in the comparative politics literature on transitions: democratic governments rarely arrive at a blank institutional slate.
Understanding the Chilean labor movement's trajectory requires situating it within the broader regional experience of Latin American unionism and the political economy of social movement recovery after authoritarianism. Across the Southern Cone, trade union movements that were subjected to varying degrees of repression during the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s emerged from those periods with starkly different capacities and political alignments. In Brazil, the labor movement that coalesced under the CUT in the 1980s played a direct role in democratic transition and eventually gave rise to a political party, the PT, that reached the presidency. Argentina's CGT, despite its own complicated history of collaboration with and resistance to military rule, retained sufficient organizational density to remain a meaningful political actor through successive crises. Chile's trajectory was more constrained precisely because the institutional intervention was more thorough. The article's framing of this as a story of both enduring legacies and emerging revitalization reflects a historiographical sophistication that resists determinism: the Plan Laboral wounded Chilean unionism deeply, but it did not kill it. The student mobilizations of 2011, the feminist strike movement, the social uprising of 2019, and the constitutional convention process of the early 2020s all demonstrated that Chilean civil society retained capacities for collective action that formal labor institutions alone could not account for. The question the article implicitly raises — and which development and civil society scholars must engage — is whether and how this broader social energy can translate into durable institutional reform of labor law.
The policy implications of this analysis extend well beyond Chile's borders and carry particular relevance for international development actors, including bilateral and multilateral ODA donors who increasingly incorporate labor standards and civil society strengthening into their programmatic frameworks. The Chilean case illustrates a problem that aid architecture has historically under-addressed: the difference between formal democratization and substantive labor democratization. Donors who condition support on electoral processes and basic freedoms of assembly often fail to grapple with the way inherited institutional frameworks from authoritarian periods continue to constrain the exercise of those freedoms in practice. A country can hold free elections while maintaining a labor code that was designed to prevent workers from exercising collective power, and the formal democratic framework does not automatically generate pressure for reform. This has direct implications for how civil society organizations are supported in post-authoritarian contexts. If ODA strategies focus primarily on building the organizational capacity of NGOs while neglecting the institutional environment in which labor unions and workers' associations must operate, they risk reinforcing a bifurcated civil society in which advocacy organizations flourish while the associational infrastructure most directly tied to economic redistribution remains stunted. The Chilean experience offers a cautionary tale and, in its revitalization narrative, a resource for practitioners seeking to understand what conditions enable labor movements to rebuild.
Looking forward, the article's framing of Chilean trade unionism at more than fifty years since the coup invites a forward-looking inquiry that is as much about the present conjuncture as about historical retrospection. The failure of the 2022 constitutional plebiscite — in which Chilean voters rejected a draft constitution that would have substantially reformed the institutional framework inherited from Pinochet — underscored the complexity of path dependency in post-authoritarian societies. Even where there is broad social consensus that inherited institutions are unjust or dysfunctional, the political coalitions and mobilization strategies required to overcome institutional inertia are difficult to assemble and sustain. For trade union movements specifically, this means that the revitalization documented in recent scholarship is real but fragile, contingent on broader political dynamics that do not always move in labor's favor. For researchers, the Chilean case suggests a productive research agenda organized around comparative institutional analysis of post-authoritarian labor law reform, the relationship between new social movements and traditional union structures, and the conditions under which civil society mobilization can translate into durable legal change. For development practitioners and the scholarly community at IOCSS and similar institutions, it is a reminder that the legacies of authoritarianism are not resolved by the moment of democratic transition — they persist in laws, norms, and political economies that require sustained, strategically intelligent effort to transform. The workers and unions of Chile are engaged in precisely that effort, and the trajectory of their struggle will have lessons for labor movements and civil society actors confronting analogous constraints across the developing world for years to come.