Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-09-08
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
More than five decades after the September 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende's government, Chile remains a touchstone case for understanding how authoritarian rule reshapes the institutional terrain on which labor movements must operate long after democratic transition. The question of trade union revitalization in Chile carries weight far beyond its borders, because the country has often been treated as a laboratory for market-oriented restructuring that other governments—advised by international financial institutions and development agencies—later sought to emulate or adapt. As global labor markets confront intensifying informalization, platform-based employment, and a resurgence of authoritarian populism in multiple regions, revisiting how the Pinochet dictatorship engineered the near-permanent weakening of organized labor offers a sobering lesson in how quickly hard-won social rights can be dismantled and how slowly, if at all, they can be rebuilt.
At the center of the analysis is the Plan Laboral of 1979, the labor code imposed by the military government that fragmented collective bargaining to the enterprise level, restricted the right to strike, curtailed union federations' capacity to coordinate across sectors, and normalized a highly flexible, precarious employment relationship. The article's central argument is that this legal architecture was never merely a technical labor reform but a deliberate political project designed to atomize working-class organization and insulate the emerging neoliberal economic model from collective contestation. Crucially, the analysis insists that these arrangements did not evaporate with the return to civilian rule in 1990; instead, they were absorbed into the DNA of Chile's post-transition institutional order, surviving successive center-left Concertación and Nueva Mayoría governments that promised reform but largely left the core architecture of enterprise-level bargaining intact. This continuity illustrates a recurring pattern in post-authoritarian political economies: formal democratization does not automatically undo the structural power asymmetries embedded during dictatorship, particularly when those asymmetries are encoded in labor law, property rights, and constitutional constraints that require supermajorities to amend.
Yet the article's account is not simply one of unbroken continuity—it also identifies signs of an emerging revitalization within Chilean unionism, situating this resurgence within the broader wave of social mobilization that culminated in the 2019 estallido social and the subsequent, ultimately unsuccessful, constitutional rewriting process. Public-sector unions, subcontracted mining workers, and newly organized service and logistics workers have found openings to rebuild associational and mobilizational power even within a legal framework designed to prevent exactly that kind of cross-sectoral coordination. This dual narrative—entrenched authoritarian legacy alongside genuine, if uneven, revitalization—resonates with debates elsewhere in Latin America and the Global South about whether labor movements can reconstitute bargaining power "from below" when formal institutions remain hostile, using strategies such as social movement unionism, community alliances, and transnational solidarity networks rather than relying solely on the legal channels that dictatorship-era codes so tightly circumscribed.
For scholars and practitioners working on official development assistance, civil society strengthening, and democratic governance, the Chilean case underscores a point that is frequently underappreciated in donor programming: institutional reform aimed at strengthening civil society or labor rights cannot be understood in purely technical or legalistic terms, because labor codes function as instruments of political power that outlive the regimes that create them. Development agencies and civil society support programs that focus narrowly on formal unionization rates, collective bargaining coverage statistics, or ILO convention ratification risk missing the deeper structural constraints—enterprise-level bargaining ceilings, replacement-worker provisions, weak federation authority—that determine whether nominal rights translate into real bargaining power. This has direct relevance for ODA-funded governance and labor-rights initiatives across the region, from Central America to the Southern Cone, where post-conflict or post-authoritarian labor codes often carry similar structural legacies that formal democratic consolidation alone does not resolve. Programs oriented toward civil society strengthening would benefit from explicitly mapping these historical-institutional constraints rather than assuming that electoral democracy and civil society funding automatically produce robust, autonomous labor organizations.
Looking forward, the Chilean trajectory offers both caution and qualified hope for researchers and practitioners tracking civil society and labor dynamics globally. The caution is that authoritarian institutional legacies can prove remarkably durable, embedding themselves in seemingly neutral legal and economic architecture that persists across multiple democratic administrations and even survives failed attempts at wholesale constitutional revision, as Chile's 2022 and 2023 referenda demonstrated. The qualified hope lies in the article's documentation of genuine associational renewal emerging from below, suggesting that labor revitalization need not wait for top-down legal overhaul but can accumulate through sectoral organizing, strategic strikes, and coalition-building that gradually shift the political cost of maintaining restrictive labor codes. For the broader community of scholars studying democratization, civil society, and political economy, the Chilean case fifty years on serves as a reminder that assessing the health of a democracy requires looking past electoral competition to the durability of the associational and bargaining infrastructure that determines whether citizens—and workers in particular—can meaningfully act collectively within it. As new authoritarian and hybrid regimes emerge globally, understanding precisely how Chile's dictatorship engineered labor's long-term weakening, and how workers are nonetheless finding pathways to rebuild power, offers an essential comparative reference point for civil society researchers and development practitioners alike.