Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-08-16
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
More than half a century after the September 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende's democratically elected government, the institutional scars carved into Chilean labor relations by Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship continue to structure the possibilities and limits of organized labor in one of Latin America's most economically dynamic societies. The publication of this analysis in Latin American Perspectives arrives at a moment of acute global significance: labor movements across the developing world are grappling simultaneously with the erosion of postwar collective bargaining frameworks, the rise of platform and precarious work, and the renewed assertiveness of right-wing governments hostile to union organization. In that context, Chile's half-century struggle to reconstitute a coherent trade union movement under the shadow of authoritarian institutional engineering offers lessons that resonate well beyond the Andes. The article's timing also carries symbolic weight — 2023 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the coup, a moment of national reckoning in Chile that coincided with the defeat of a proposed new constitution and a rightward shift in the country's electoral politics. Understanding why Chilean labor remains comparatively fragmented despite the formal restoration of democracy in 1990 requires engaging seriously with the structural inheritances this article sets out to examine.
The analytical core of the article centers on what scholars of Chilean political economy have long identified as the foundational rupture: the Plan Laboral of 1979, designed by the University of Chicago-trained economist José Piñera under the Pinochet regime. The Plan Laboral systematically dismantled the architecture of solidaristic unionism that had been built over decades of Chilean labor history. It did so through a set of interlocking mechanisms — restricting collective bargaining to the firm level rather than the sector or industry level, prohibiting sympathy strikes and solidarity action across enterprise boundaries, fragmenting union membership through competing union structures within the same workplace, and subordinating collective contracts to individual negotiation in ways that gave employers overwhelming structural advantages. What the article appears to demonstrate is that these mechanisms were not merely transient legal provisions easily reversed by democratic legislation; rather, they constituted a new institutional equilibrium that proved remarkably durable because they reshaped the incentive structures for both employers and workers, embedded themselves in the training and expectations of a new generation of human resources professionals and labor lawyers, and generated organized constituencies with vested interests in their preservation. The political economies of path dependence, once established under authoritarian auspices, tend to exhibit strong stickiness even after the formal conditions of their creation have been superseded.
Placing the Chilean case within broader regional and global trends sharpens its analytical significance considerably. Across Latin America, the relationship between authoritarian interruptions and long-term institutional deformation of labor markets constitutes one of the most consequential research frontiers in comparative political economy. Argentina's military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 similarly sought to break the power of the CGT and restructure industrial relations along more individualized lines, though with less lasting success given Peronism's institutional resilience. Brazil under the military regime of 1964 to 1985 produced what scholars have called a "corporatist straitjacket" that paradoxically preserved union structures while stripping them of genuine bargaining autonomy — a legacy that gave rise to the combative new unionism (novo sindicalismo) of the late 1970s and the eventual emergence of the PT and the CUT. Chile's trajectory was arguably the most radical because the Pinochet regime coupled political repression of extraordinary intensity with the most thoroughgoing neoliberal economic restructuring undertaken anywhere in the world at that time, producing what observers called a "laboratory" of market liberalization that the IMF and World Bank subsequently sought to export globally. The article's contribution is to trace how that laboratory experiment deposited institutional sediment that even center-left governments — including those of Ricardo Lagos, Michelle Bachelet, and Gabriel Boric — have found extraordinarily difficult to dislodge.
The policy implications of this analysis are substantial for researchers and practitioners working in the fields of ODA, civil society strengthening, and democratic governance. International development organizations and bilateral donors have invested heavily in labor rights programming across the Global South, often proceeding from a baseline assumption that formal legal reforms — strengthening labor inspection, ratifying ILO conventions, revising labor codes — are sufficient to produce genuine improvements in worker organizing capacity and collective bargaining outcomes. The Chilean experience constitutes a powerful empirical challenge to this assumption. When authoritarian regimes successfully engineer the atomization of labor through institutional design, the resulting equilibrium tends to persist not merely because employers resist change — which they do — but because workers themselves adapt their strategies and expectations to the constrained environment they inhabit. Enterprise-level unionism, even when nominally free, tends to produce risk-averse, accommodationist unions focused on incremental gains rather than solidaristic movements capable of challenging the underlying distribution of power. Donors and civil society organizations working to revitalize labor movements in post-authoritarian contexts must therefore attend to the deeper institutional architecture, not merely the formal legal framework, and invest in the patient reconstruction of cross-enterprise solidarities, federated structures, and labor education that can begin to counteract decades of atomization.
The article's attention to signs of revitalization alongside the legacy of constraint is analytically important and politically significant. Chile's recent period has not been one of unrelieved labor quiescence. The massive social uprising of October 2019 — the estallido social — demonstrated that beneath the surface of institutional fragmentation lay reservoirs of popular discontent and organizational capacity that could be mobilized under the right conditions. The election of Gabriel Boric in 2021, drawing on a coalition that included the Frente Amplio and figures with roots in the student and labor movements of the previous decade, raised expectations of substantial labor reform. The subsequent failure of the constitutional referendum and the administration's constrained legislative maneuvering illustrate precisely the kind of political stalemate that path-dependent institutional lock-in tends to produce: reformist governments with genuine political will face structural obstacles that cannot be overcome through electoral success alone. For researchers, the Chilean case thus offers a crucial test of competing theories about institutional change — whether gradual layering, conversion, or displacement can produce genuine transformation, or whether the most deeply embedded authoritarian institutional legacies require more fundamental political ruptures. For practitioners, it is a sobering reminder that labor revitalization requires not only favorable political windows but sustained organizational investment across years and decades, building the intermediate structures of solidarity — sectoral federations, labor education centers, cross-union coordination bodies — that the Pinochet regime systematically destroyed.
Looking forward, the trajectory of Chilean trade unionism will likely serve as a reference point for a growing number of societies grappling with the aftereffects of authoritarian labor restructuring, whether historically rooted or more recently imposed. The spread of gig economy employment, the erosion of stable industrial employment in favor of service-sector informality, and the emergence of new forms of platform work are producing conditions that in some respects replicate the atomizing logic of the Plan Laboral at a global scale — individualizing the employment relationship, fragmenting collective identities, and creating structural incentives against solidaristic organization. In that sense, the struggles of Chilean workers to reconstitute meaningful collective agency across fifty years are not simply a national story but a vanguard case for understanding the conditions under which organized labor can survive and potentially revitalize itself against deeply unfavorable institutional terrain. The scholarly community working at the intersection of labor studies, comparative political economy, and development studies would do well to engage seriously with the findings of this article — not as a counsel of despair about the durability of authoritarian legacies, but as a rigorous account of the specific mechanisms through which those legacies operate, which is the necessary prerequisite for designing interventions capable of actually overcoming them.