Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-07-19
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The question of how authoritarian regimes reshape labor institutions long after their formal dissolution sits at the heart of contemporary debates in comparative political economy. Across the Global South, scholars and practitioners increasingly recognize that the legacy of military rule is not merely a matter of historical memory but of institutional architecture — the rules, norms, and organizational forms that continue to structure social relations decades after transitions to democracy. Chile presents one of the most analytically compelling cases in this regard. More than fifty years after the coup of September 11, 1973, which brought General Augusto Pinochet to power and dismantled one of Latin America's most vibrant labor movements, the question of whether Chilean trade unionism can recover its historical role as a vehicle for working-class organization and political voice remains urgent. The article under review in Latin American Perspectives engages precisely this question, situating the trajectory of Chilean labor within the long shadow of dictatorship while attending to signs of emergent revitalization that have gathered force in recent years.
The analytical contribution of this scholarship lies in its careful treatment of the politico-economic and institutional transformations that the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990) engineered in Chilean labor relations. Chief among these was the Plan Laboral of 1979, designed by José Piñera under the ideological guidance of the so-called Chicago Boys. The Plan Laboral was not simply a technocratic labor reform; it was a structural counterrevolution. By confining collective bargaining to the enterprise level, fragmenting union representation, imposing strict limitations on the right to strike, and privileging individual over collective contracts, the Plan Laboral effectively dismantled the institutional foundations on which Chilean labor power had rested since the early twentieth century. Prior to the coup, Chile had possessed one of the most organized working classes in the region, with strong industrial unions, a robust labor left, and a tradition of political unionism that had made labor central to democratic contestation. The Pinochet regime systematically dismantled these structures through a combination of violent repression — including the assassination, torture, and exile of union leaders — and legal-institutional engineering that subordinated collective labor rights to market logic. The result was a labor regime designed not merely to weaken unions temporarily but to make meaningful unionism structurally difficult to sustain.
What makes the Chilean case particularly significant for scholars of ODA, civil society, and political economy is that the transition to democracy in 1990 did not reverse these structural transformations. The Concertación governments that governed Chile through the 1990s and 2000s, while restoring political freedoms and improving certain social indicators, largely preserved the neoliberal labor framework inherited from the dictatorship. Union density remained chronically low by regional and global standards. The enterprise-based bargaining structure continued to fragment labor's collective capacity. This path dependency illustrates a broader phenomenon observable across the developing world: that the institutional residue of authoritarianism frequently outlasts the authoritarian regime itself, embedded in laws, regulatory agencies, and market structures that acquire their own constituencies and political defenders over time. In this sense, the Chilean labor case speaks directly to longstanding debates about the durability of authoritarian legacies in societies undergoing democratic transition — a question of central concern to development practitioners and civil society researchers who work in post-conflict and post-authoritarian contexts across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
The article's attention to emerging revitalization is equally important and connects to broader regional dynamics that have unsettled the neoliberal consensus across Latin America in recent years. Chile's estallido social of October 2019 — a mass social uprising triggered by a rise in metro fares but drawing on decades of accumulated grievance over inequality, privatized social services, and wage stagnation — represented a profound rupture in the political landscape. Organized labor was both a participant in and a beneficiary of this social mobilization, which demonstrated the continued capacity of Chilean workers to act collectively outside the formal institutional channels that the Plan Laboral had constrained. The subsequent constitutional process, however interrupted and contested it proved, opened space for rethinking fundamental questions about labor rights, social protections, and the role of collective organization in the Chilean state. This dynamic parallels broader trends in the region — from Mexico's labor reform under AMLO to Argentina's persistent union politics and Bolivia's labor-aligned governance — where the post-Washington Consensus moment has prompted renewed attention to collective labor rights as instruments of development and social equity rather than obstacles to market efficiency. Whether Chile's labor movement can consolidate this moment of revitalization into durable institutional gains remains, as the article underscores, an open and contested question.
The policy implications of this analysis extend well beyond Chile's borders. For development agencies and ODA practitioners, the Chilean experience offers a cautionary lesson about the long-term institutional consequences of labor market deregulation under conditions of authoritarian imposition. Development interventions that focus narrowly on economic growth metrics or short-term poverty reduction while ignoring the organizational capacity of labor movements risk reproducing forms of social exclusion that undermine the sustainability of development gains over time. Civil society organizations and international donors working in post-authoritarian settings would do well to attend to the structural dimensions of labor law and collective bargaining rights as governance issues — not merely economic ones — recognizing that weak labor institutions tend to produce persistent inequality, political instability, and stunted civil society ecosystems. For researchers, the Chilean case underscores the necessity of longitudinal analysis that traces institutional trajectories across regime changes, resisting the temptation to treat the moment of democratic transition as a clean break with the authoritarian past.
Looking forward, the trajectory of Chilean trade unionism will be shaped by several intersecting forces: the capacity of labor organizations to build coalitions with new social movements, including feminist, environmental, and student groups that emerged prominently in the estallido; the willingness of successive governments to pursue meaningful labor law reform rather than incremental adjustments; and the structural pressures of technological change, informalización, and global supply chain restructuring that are reshaping the conditions of work across the region and the world. The fifty-year anniversary of the coup is not merely a commemorative occasion but an analytical vantage point from which to assess how far Chile has traveled — and how far it has yet to go — in dismantling the institutional architecture of authoritarian labor control. For the international scholarly and practitioner community, keeping a close watch on this trajectory is not a matter of regional particularism but of understanding the enduring relationship between political economy, institutional design, and the capacity of organized civil society to claim meaningful agency in democratic life.