Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-09-06
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
More than five decades after the September 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende's Unidad Popular government, Chile continues to grapple with the institutional residue of the Pinochet dictatorship in ways that extend far beyond the constitutional debates that have dominated international headlines since 2019. Among the least visible but most consequential of these legacies is the condition of organized labor. As global attention turns increasingly toward questions of inequality, informal work, and the erosion of collective bargaining power in both the Global North and South, Chile offers a particularly instructive case: a country once held up as the laboratory for neoliberal restructuring, whose labor institutions were deliberately re-engineered to prevent the kind of working-class mobilization that had underpinned the Allende project. Understanding what has happened to Chilean unions since 1973 is not merely a historical exercise but a window into how authoritarian regimes can encode their political preferences into economic architecture that long outlives the dictatorship itself, and into what it takes for civil society actors to recover agency within institutions designed to constrain them.
The article's central analytical thread runs through the 1979 Plan Laboral, the labor code drafted under the guidance of Pinochet's civilian economic advisers, the so-called Chicago Boys, and specifically José Piñera. The Plan Laboral was not an incidental piece of technocratic reform; it was a calculated instrument for fragmenting the union movement that had been central to Chilean political life since the early twentieth century. By decentralizing collective bargaining to the enterprise level, restricting the right to strike, permitting employers to hire replacement workers during labor disputes, and eliminating industry-wide and sectoral bargaining structures, the Plan Laboral atomized what had previously been a nationally coordinated labor movement into thousands of isolated, weak bargaining units. The article's argument, consistent with a substantial body of scholarship on Chilean political economy, is that this was not simply market liberalization but a deliberately political project: the reconstruction of the state-labor-capital relationship to permanently reduce the bargaining power of organized workers, insulating the emerging neoliberal model from the kind of contentious politics that had characterized the pre-coup decades. Crucially, much of this architecture survived the 1990 transition to democracy largely intact, since successive Concertación governments, wary of destabilizing the macroeconomic consensus and constrained by the binomial electoral system and constitutional entrenchments left by the outgoing military regime, proved unwilling or unable to fundamentally overhaul the labor code inherited from the dictatorship.
This pattern of authoritarian institutional persistence within nominally democratic successor states resonates well beyond the Chilean case and speaks directly to concerns central to IOCSS's broader research agenda on civil society and political economy across the Global South. In much of Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Southeast Asia, transitions from authoritarian rule have frequently left labor and civil society organizations operating within legal and institutional frameworks originally designed to demobilize them, even decades after formal democratization. The Chilean experience illustrates a broader theoretical point relevant to comparative studies of civil society revitalization: formal democratic transition does not automatically restore the associational infrastructure of civil society, particularly when economic elites who benefited from authoritarian-era restructuring retain disproportionate influence over subsequent policymaking. This has direct implications for how development institutions and donors conceptualize "civil society strengthening" programs, which often focus on NGO capacity-building or electoral institutions while paying comparatively little attention to labor law and collective bargaining frameworks, despite unions historically constituting one of the most durable and broadly representative forms of civic organization in the Global South.
The article's attention to what it terms an "emerging revitalization" is significant because it moves beyond a purely declensionist narrative of Chilean labor as permanently crippled by the Pinochet-era reforms. The mobilizations surrounding the 2019 estallido social, the subsequent (ultimately unsuccessful) constitutional convention process, and more recent legislative gains such as the 40-hour workweek law and modest reforms to the pension system suggest that Chilean civil society, including its labor wing, has found new avenues for collective action even without a wholesale dismantling of the Plan Laboral's core architecture. This matters for how researchers understand pathways of institutional change: rather than requiring formal legal overhaul as a precondition, labor revitalization in Chile appears to be proceeding through parallel channels, including social movement unionism, cross-sectoral coalitions with student and feminist movements, and renewed public legitimacy for collective action following the discrediting of the neoliberal consensus in the wake of 2019. This is consistent with comparative literature suggesting that civil society renewal in post-authoritarian contexts often occurs informally and incrementally before, or even in the absence of, formal legal codification.
For policymakers and development practitioners, the Chilean case carries several implications worth foregrounding. First, it underscores that labor law reform should be treated as a first-order concern in transitional justice and democratization agendas, not a secondary technical matter to be addressed after political and electoral institutions are settled; ODA-funded governance programs that neglect labor regulation risk leaving a critical dimension of authoritarian legacy untouched. Second, it suggests that international assistance to civil society organizations, including trade unions, should be structured to support coalition-building across sectors rather than narrowly sector-specific capacity building, given that Chilean labor's recent gains have come substantially through alliance with other social movements. Finally, the Chilean trajectory offers a cautionary and hopeful lesson simultaneously for researchers and practitioners tracking similar dynamics in other post-authoritarian or post-conflict settings, from South Korea's own labor history to more recent transitions in Tunisia or Myanmar's aborted opening: institutional legacies of authoritarianism can be extraordinarily durable, resistant even to decades of formal democratic governance, but they are not immutable, and moments of broader political rupture can create openings for civil society actors to rebuild associational power even when the underlying legal scaffolding remains only partially reformed. As Chile approaches further rounds of political and possibly constitutional contestation, the trajectory of its trade union movement will remain an important bellwether for whether substantive, rather than merely procedural, democratization is achievable within institutions engineered explicitly to prevent it.