Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-08-14
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The persistence of authoritarian institutional legacies within formally democratic political systems represents one of the most consequential and underexamined challenges in comparative political economy. Across Latin America, the transitions from military dictatorship to electoral democracy during the 1980s and 1990s were celebrated as transformative moments, yet the structural arrangements forged under authoritarian conditions frequently survived those transitions with remarkable durability. Nowhere is this dynamic more starkly visible than in Chile, where the economic and labor market architecture engineered by Augusto Pinochet's regime between 1973 and 1990 continued to shape the distribution of power between capital and labor for decades after the dictator left office. As the world marks more than half a century since the September 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government, a growing body of scholarship is returning to the foundational question of how deeply those seventeen years of authoritarian transformation altered the possibilities of collective organization, and what, if anything, has begun to change. The article published in Latin American Perspectives joins this scholarly moment with a historically grounded investigation into Chilean trade unionism — its subordination under dictatorship, its constrained recovery during the transition, and the tentative signs of revitalization that have emerged in recent years.
The analytical centerpiece of the article is the Plan Laboral of 1979, introduced by the Pinochet regime's labor minister José Piñera as a wholesale redesign of industrial relations in Chile. The Plan was not a reform of existing labor law; it was a replacement of the entire institutional framework governing the relationship between workers and employers. Its architects were explicit about its ideological purpose: to atomize organized labor by restricting collective bargaining to the level of the individual firm rather than the sector or industry, to prohibit solidarity strikes and sympathy actions that might allow workers across enterprises to act in concert, and to create a regulatory environment in which the formation of alternative unions within the same firm could effectively neutralize any single union's bargaining leverage. These provisions were designed not merely to weaken trade unions in the short term but to alter the structural incentives governing worker organization so profoundly that union revitalization would remain perpetually difficult even after the political conditions that produced the Plan had changed. The article situates this institutional transformation within the broader political-economic project of Chilean neoliberalism, which reoriented the country's development model toward export-led growth, labor flexibility, and the disciplining of social claims through market mechanisms. The coup was therefore not only a political event but the precondition for an economic restructuring that redefined the position of organized labor within Chilean society.
What makes the Chilean case so instructive for comparative scholarship on labor and development is precisely how long those authoritarian institutional legacies endured beyond the formal transition to democracy. The 1989-1990 democratic transition returned electoral competition to Chile but left the 1979 Labor Plan substantially intact. The Concertación governments that governed Chile from 1990 onward were constrained by a combination of factors — the constitutional architecture Pinochet had left behind, the political economy of a country deeply integrated into global markets, and a strategic calculation among center-left elites that labor market flexibility was a necessary concession to investor confidence. The result was a pattern common to many post-authoritarian transitions in Latin America: political liberalization proceeded without a corresponding rebalancing of power in labor markets. Union density remained low, collective bargaining coverage stayed narrow and fragmented, and the sectoral coordination that characterizes more solidaristic labor market models in Europe or even in some other Latin American contexts was structurally foreclosed. This is a crucial insight for ODA and civil society researchers: formal democratic restoration does not automatically generate the civic and organizational infrastructure that makes substantive democratic participation meaningful. Authoritarian institutional design can function as a durable constraint on collective action long after the authoritarian political actors who designed it have exited the stage.
The article's engagement with the "emerging revitalization" of Chilean labor points toward a more recent dynamic that connects the trade union question to broader regional and global developments. The social uprising of October 2019 — the estallido social — and the subsequent constitutional process that it catalyzed revealed deep popular discontent with the socioeconomic model that Pinochet's institutional revolution had entrenched. Student movements, feminist organizations, indigenous rights groups, and labor organizations converged in a moment of extraordinary civic mobilization that represented, for many observers, the most significant rupture with the post-authoritarian settlement since democracy's return. The constitutional convention elected in 2021, which included significant labor and civil society representation, was an institutional expression of this broader demand for a restructuring of Chilean social relations. Though the proposed constitution was rejected in the September 2022 plebiscite, the process itself demonstrated that the organized bases of Chilean civil society had developed new capacities for political intervention. For trade unionism specifically, this context created both opportunities and pressures: opportunities to reconnect with a broader social movement energy, and pressures to translate diffuse protest energy into durable organizational gains within a labor market framework that remained structurally hostile.
The policy implications of this analysis extend well beyond the Chilean case and carry significant relevance for international development practitioners and civil society researchers working across the Global South. The Chilean experience illustrates the limits of what might be called "institutional minimalism" in democratic transitions — the assumption that restoring electoral competition and formal civil liberties is sufficient to enable the recovery of civil society organizations that authoritarian rule has suppressed. Where authoritarian regimes have, as in Chile, embedded their distributional preferences directly into the architecture of labor law, property rights, and market regulation, formal political transitions leave those preferences structurally in place. International development actors engaged in governance programming, labor standards work, or civil society strengthening in post-authoritarian contexts must therefore attend seriously to the question of institutional legacy and the depth of reform required to enable genuine organizational recovery. The ILO's framework on freedom of association and collective bargaining, for instance, points toward the kinds of institutional changes — sectoral bargaining rights, restrictions on firm-level union fragmentation, meaningful strike protections — that are necessary conditions for union revitalization, yet these changes frequently encounter resistance precisely because they challenge arrangements that powerful economic interests have organized around for decades.
Looking forward, the scholarly and practical significance of this article lies in the way it holds in tension two realities that are sometimes treated as contradictory: the extraordinary durability of authoritarian institutional legacies, and the genuine possibility of their transformation. Fifty years is a long arc of analysis, and the persistence of the 1979 Labor Plan's core logic across half a century of Chilean history should caution against teleological assumptions about democratic consolidation automatically restoring the associational foundations of democratic politics. At the same time, the estallido social and its aftermath suggest that institutional legacies, however durable, are not eternal. They are sustained by particular political coalitions and legitimating ideologies, and when those coalitions fracture and those ideologies lose purchase — as happened dramatically in Chile after 2019 — windows for structural reform can open. For researchers and practitioners, the imperative is to understand those windows clearly enough to act usefully when they appear. The Chilean trade union movement's trajectory over more than five decades offers a case study in institutional resilience, subordination, and the contested possibility of revitalization that should inform how scholars of Latin American political economy, labor rights advocates, and international development actors think about the long shadow that authoritarian governance continues to cast over democratic life.