Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-07-28
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The question of how authoritarian ruptures shape labor institutions across decades remains one of the most consequential and underexamined problems in comparative political economy. As the world marks more than half a century since the September 1973 coup in Chile — one of the twentieth century's most studied cases of militarized neoliberal transformation — scholarship has returned with fresh urgency to assess the durability of the Pinochet dictatorship's institutional engineering and the conditions under which organized labor might reassert itself as a meaningful political and economic actor. Published in Latin American Perspectives, this article examines how the politico-economic and institutional changes imposed during the military period (1973–1990) have structured, constrained, and in partial ways been contested by Chilean trade unionism over the subsequent generation. The stakes of this inquiry extend well beyond Chile's borders, touching on fundamental debates about the reversibility of authoritarian institutional settlements, the conditions for labor revitalization under post-neoliberal political cycles, and the relationship between civil society organizations and democratic consolidation in the Global South.
The analytic core of the article rests on a close engagement with the Plan Laboral of 1979, the landmark labor code reform introduced by the Pinochet regime under the technocratic guidance of José Piñera. The Plan Laboral was not merely a set of regulatory adjustments; it was a deliberate institutional architecture designed to fragment organized labor at the enterprise level, prohibit multi-employer and sectoral bargaining, impose strict limits on strike duration and solidarity actions, and ultimately sever the structural links between unions and political parties that had characterized Chilean labor relations in the pre-coup period. The effect was to convert unionism from a movement capable of contesting the broader distribution of economic and political power into a narrowly instrumental mechanism for firm-level wage negotiation. This institutional transformation was compounded by the simultaneous application of Chicago School macroeconomic orthodoxy — privatization, trade liberalization, pension individualization — which restructured the Chilean economy in ways that favored capital mobility and dispersed the sectoral concentrations of workers that had historically sustained strong union density. The article's contribution is to trace how this dual institutional and structural legacy has persisted across democratic transitions and left-leaning governments, producing what might be described as a path-dependent trap: democratic governments have operated under political and constitutional constraints that rendered fundamental labor law reform politically costly even when it was rhetorically embraced.
The broader regional and global context matters substantially here. Chile's post-1973 transformation was in many respects the prototype for the structural adjustment programs that international financial institutions would export across Latin America during the 1980s and into Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe in subsequent decades. The deliberate weakening of organized labor was not incidental to this model but central to it; the suppression of collective bargaining capacity was understood by its architects as a precondition for the sustained downward flexibility of wages and for the attraction of foreign investment. What the Chilean case illustrates with particular clarity is that such institutional choices do not simply dissolve when authoritarian governments exit power. The Concertación governments that governed Chile from 1990 onward inherited not only the formal legal framework of the Plan Laboral but also a labor movement that had been organizationally fragmented, numerically weakened, and politically marginalized over seventeen years. Comparative scholarship on labor in Brazil, Argentina, and South Korea has similarly documented how democratic transitions that preserve authoritarian-era labor codes produce systematically weaker unions than transitions accompanied by foundational legal reform, a pattern with important implications for how development practitioners and civil society advocates should assess the quality of democratic consolidation beyond electoral metrics.
The policy significance of this analysis is sharpened by the article's engagement with the concept of revitalization. Despite the persistent weight of the Pinochet settlement, the Chilean labor movement has shown evidence of renewed mobilization capacity in the decade following the social uprising of October 2019, the estallido social, which exposed the accumulated tensions of three decades of growth-with-inequality. The Constitutional Convention process, the election of Gabriel Boric — himself a figure formed in student movement politics — and subsequent legislative efforts to reform the labor code represent the most serious attempt since the transition to revisit the institutional architecture laid down by the 1979 Plan Laboral. The article's framing, situating this moment as an "emerging revitalization" rather than an accomplished transformation, is analytically precise and politically important: it avoids both the triumphalism that has sometimes characterized assessments of progressive cycles in Latin America and the resigned fatalism that treats authoritarian institutional legacies as permanently insurmountable. The conditions for genuine labor revitalization, the analysis implies, require not only favorable electoral outcomes but sustained civil society mobilization capable of sustaining political pressure for institutional change across multiple legislative cycles.
From a research perspective, this article makes a valuable contribution to a literature that has sometimes treated the Chilean labor market as a settled case study in neoliberal success rather than as a site of ongoing institutional contestation. It invites scholars working on ODA and development practice to take institutional legacies seriously as variables that shape the effectiveness of governance reforms and civil society strengthening programs. Donors and international organizations investing in labor rights, social dialogue, and decent work frameworks in democratizing contexts must reckon with the possibility that formal legal reforms are necessary but insufficient conditions for change when underlying institutional structures — enterprise-level bargaining systems, weak inspection regimes, fragmented union structures — reproduce the functional logic of the original authoritarian settlement. For researchers, the Chilean case over the next several years will constitute a natural experiment of exceptional importance: whether a democratic left government, operating within constitutional constraints and facing organized business resistance, can meaningfully restructure labor institutions that were deliberately designed to outlast the dictatorship that created them. The answer will carry implications not only for Latin American political economy but for the broader international debate about the relationship between institutional reform, civil society capacity, and the possibility of redistribution within integrated global markets.