Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-09-14
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
Chile's 2026 commemoration of more than five decades since the September 11, 1973 coup d'état arrives at a moment when questions of labor power, inequality, and institutional legitimacy have returned to the center of the country's political life. The 2019 estallido social and the subsequent, ultimately unsuccessful constitutional rewriting process exposed how deeply the socioeconomic architecture inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship still structures Chilean society, even after three and a half decades of formally democratic governance. Trade unions, once among the most powerful and politically consequential labor movements in Latin America, sit at the heart of this unfinished reckoning. Understanding why Chilean unionism remains comparatively weak, fragmented, and defensive—even as broader currents of social discontent and mobilization have intensified—requires examining the specific legal and institutional machinery the dictatorship built to dismantle collective labor power, and asking whether that machinery is now beginning to loosen its grip.
The article under review, appearing in Latin American Perspectives, centers its analysis on the Plan Laboral of 1979, the labor code imposed by the military regime's economic team under the influence of the "Chicago Boys" and the broader neoliberal restructuring project. The Plan Laboral was not a peripheral technical reform; it was a deliberate architecture of demobilization, designed to atomize collective bargaining to the enterprise level, restrict the right to strike through mechanisms like permanent replacement of striking workers, fragment union representation, and sever unions from the confederal and political structures—above all the historic alliance with left political parties—that had made Chilean labor a formidable actor before 1973. By analyzing how these institutional constraints persisted largely intact through the post-1990 democratic transition, negotiated under pacted arrangements that prioritized macroeconomic stability and elite consensus over structural labor reform, the article situates contemporary union weakness not as a natural consequence of deindustrialization or globalization alone, but as the durable legacy of an authoritarian legal order that successive democratic governments chose not to fully dismantle. This argument fits within a well-established literature on the "authoritarian enclaves" embedded in Chilean democracy, extending that framework specifically into the terrain of labor relations, where reforms under the Concertación and later coalitions were incremental, contested, and frequently diluted in negotiation with business associations that retained disproportionate structural power.
What makes this contribution significant is its attention to signs of revitalization amid this constrained institutional terrain. Chilean union density has hovered at levels far below the Latin American historical peaks of the pre-1973 period, and collective bargaining coverage remains narrow and enterprise-bound. Yet the article traces an emerging countertrend: renewed strike activity in strategic sectors such as mining, port logistics, and public services; the political salience of labor demands during the 2019–2020 uprising and the constitutional conventions that followed; and legislative gains such as the 40-hour workweek law and debates over multi-employer bargaining that would have been unthinkable within the Plan Laboral's original logic. This revitalization thesis is important because it resists both a purely pessimistic reading—in which the authoritarian legal legacy is treated as immutable—and an overly optimistic one that would mistake episodic mobilization for structural transformation. The nuanced position, that Chile is caught between authoritarian legacies and emergent revitalization, mirrors debates in comparative labor studies about whether social movement unionism can substitute for, or eventually translate into, durable institutional bargaining power.
This case resonates well beyond Chile's borders and speaks directly to broader regional and global political economy trends that IOCSS tracks closely. Across Latin America, the legacies of authoritarian-era labor codes—whether imposed by military dictatorships in the Southern Cone or by structural adjustment programs elsewhere—continue to shape the terms on which civil society organizations, including unions, can organize, negotiate, and claim resources. The Chilean case is paradigmatic precisely because it was the laboratory for neoliberal restructuring that later diffused globally through the Washington Consensus and, indirectly, through the conditionality frameworks attached to development finance and technical assistance in many recipient countries. For scholars and practitioners of official development assistance, the Chilean trajectory is a cautionary illustration of how institutional reforms justified in the name of economic efficiency or investment climate can produce path-dependent constraints on civil society organizing that persist long after the political conditions that produced them have changed. It also underscores a broader point relevant to civil society studies generally: formal democratization does not automatically restore associational power that authoritarian rule has deliberately engineered away, particularly when transitional pacts prioritize elite continuity over structural redistribution.
The policy implications are substantial. For Chilean policymakers, the article's framing suggests that piecemeal adjustments to the Plan Laboral's residual provisions—modest expansions of bargaining scope, incremental strike protections—are unlikely to produce a qualitative shift in union power without addressing the structural fragmentation of representation and the enterprise-level ceiling on collective bargaining. For international development and labor rights actors, including ILO monitoring mechanisms and bilateral donors engaged in labor governance programming, the case reinforces the importance of assessing not merely the formal existence of labor rights protections but their institutional depth and enforceability. For civil society funders and researchers more broadly, Chile demonstrates that revitalization of associational life after authoritarian rupture is neither automatic nor linear; it depends on the interaction between legal opportunity structures, generational renewal within movements, and moments of political crisis that create openings for institutional renegotiation, such as the 2019 uprising provided.
Looking forward, researchers examining Chilean and comparative labor politics will need to track whether the current period of partial reform and episodic mobilization consolidates into durable institutional change or reverts, as it has before, to a pattern of contained conflict managed within the Plan Laboral's enduring parameters. The trajectory of pending bargaining reform legislation, the political fate of union-friendly coalitions in upcoming electoral cycles, and the capacity of a new generation of labor leaders to rebuild the confederal linkages that the dictatorship severed will all be critical indicators. For practitioners in the development and civil society space, the Chilean case offers a broader methodological lesson: assessing the health of labor and civil society organizing anywhere requires historicizing present institutional constraints, tracing them to their origins, and resisting the temptation to read current weakness as simply a function of contemporary economic conditions rather than of unresolved authoritarian legacies still embedded in law.