Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-07-31
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The fiftieth anniversary of the September 1973 coup d'état in Chile has prompted a renewed wave of scholarly reflection on one of the most consequential political ruptures in twentieth-century Latin American history. Yet while much of the commemorative literature has focused on questions of memory, transitional justice, and democratic consolidation, a crucial dimension of Pinochet's institutional legacy has received comparatively less sustained attention: the systematic transformation of Chilean labor relations. The article under review, published in Latin American Perspectives, addresses this gap directly by tracing how the politico-economic restructuring imposed under military rule fundamentally remade the architecture of Chilean trade unionism — and why that remade architecture continues to shape the possibilities and limits of organized labor more than half a century after the coup. At a moment when labor movements across Latin America are grappling with the twin pressures of economic liberalization and democratic backsliding, the Chilean case offers both cautionary lessons and tentative grounds for cautious optimism.
The analytical core of the article centers on the Plan Laboral of 1979, the labor code reform introduced under the dictatorship by then-Labor Minister José Piñera. The Plan Laboral represented far more than a technical adjustment to collective bargaining procedures; it constituted a deliberate ideological project aimed at atomizing labor power and embedding market logic into the fundamental structures of worker representation. By restricting collective bargaining to the firm level, prohibiting solidarity strikes, limiting union membership to workers within a single enterprise, and introducing mechanisms for union replacement during work stoppages, the 1979 legislation effectively dismantled the confederal and industrywide bargaining structures that had characterized Chilean unionism in the decades before the coup. The political calculus was transparent: a fragmented labor movement organized at the enterprise level would be structurally incapable of mounting the kind of cross-sectoral coalitions that had sustained the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende and, more broadly, that had made Chilean labor one of the most politically consequential in the region. What the article illuminates is that this fragmentation was not merely a product of repression — though repression was severe — but was institutionalized in law in ways designed to outlast the dictatorship itself.
This institutionalization is precisely what makes the Chilean case theoretically significant for comparative scholarship on authoritarian legacies and democratic transitions. Scholars working in the tradition of historical institutionalism have long observed that political and economic institutions tend to exhibit path dependency: the constraints and incentives embedded in earlier arrangements shape the range of choices available to subsequent actors, often in ways that reproduce the original power asymmetries long after the circumstances that generated them have changed. Chile's post-1990 democratic governments inherited the Plan Laboral framework largely intact, and successive administrations — including those of the center-left Concertación coalition — proved unable or unwilling to undertake the comprehensive labor reform that union confederations demanded. The result was what many analysts have called a "protected" or "partial" democracy, one in which formal political liberties were restored but in which the economic and institutional architecture of the Pinochet era persisted as a structural constraint on redistributive politics. The article situates Chilean trade unionism within this broader problematic, showing how the labor movement has been compelled to operate within institutional parameters not of its own making and consistently disadvantageous to its collective power.
The broader regional context matters here in ways that extend beyond Chile's borders. Across Latin America, the relationship between authoritarian legacies and labor market institutions has been a defining fault line in the politics of democratic consolidation. In Brazil, the Vargas-era corporatist labor framework was partially dismantled but its organizational residues persisted into the democratic period, shaping the conditions under which the PT and the CUT built their historic alliance. In Argentina, the peculiar durability of Peronist labor structures under successive military and civilian governments produced a different but comparably path-dependent dynamic. What distinguishes the Chilean case is the thoroughness with which neoliberal restructuring was inscribed into labor law under conditions of authoritarian closure, making the subsequent task of institutional reform politically and technically more demanding. The article's contribution is to insist on this specificity rather than subsuming Chile into a generic Latin American narrative of neoliberalism and labor decline. The particular mechanisms of the Plan Laboral — enterprise-level bargaining, replacement workers, restricted strike rights — have had precise and traceable effects on union density, collective bargaining coverage, and wage outcomes that distinguish Chile from its regional neighbors in ways that matter for both scholars and practitioners.
The article also engages with what it describes as an emerging revitalization of Chilean trade unionism, a development that complicates any straightforwardly pessimistic reading of the post-coup legacy. The social uprising of October 2019, the constituent process that followed, and the subsequent election of Gabriel Boric — himself a figure formed in student movement politics — created a conjuncture in which long-deferred questions about labor reform returned to the political agenda with unusual urgency. The Boric government's early legislative priorities included proposals to reform collective bargaining structures, strengthen union rights, and reduce the scope of the replacement worker provisions that had been central to the Plan Laboral's anti-labor logic. Whether these reforms will prove durable or will be constrained by the same institutional and political forces that have blunted previous reform efforts remains an open question, one that the article wisely declines to answer with false confidence. What it suggests instead is that the social and organizational energies released by the 2019 uprising and the constituent process have altered the political context in ways that may create more favorable conditions for labor movement revitalization than have existed at any point in the post-transition period.
For researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of ODA, civil society, and democratic governance, the article raises important questions about the conditions under which internationally supported democratic transitions actually deliver on their normative premises. Donors and multilateral institutions that supported Chile's democratic transition in the 1990s largely accepted the inherited economic and labor institutional framework as a given, treating political liberalization as the primary measure of democratic progress. The article implicitly challenges this narrowing of the democratic agenda by demonstrating how thoroughly the exclusion of organized labor from meaningful collective bargaining power has constrained the redistributive possibilities of Chilean democracy. This has direct relevance for contemporary ODA programming in contexts where political transitions are occurring alongside or in the wake of neoliberal restructuring, from sub-Saharan Africa to parts of Southeast Asia. The Chilean experience suggests that international support for civil society strengthening must extend to labor organizations and must engage seriously with the institutional frameworks — including labor codes and collective bargaining rules — that determine whether formal organizational freedoms translate into real collective power. The lesson, drawn from more than fifty years of living with the Plan Laboral's consequences, is that democratic consolidation without labor reform is a historically unstable and socially costly arrangement, one whose costs are borne disproportionately by workers with the least capacity to absorb them.