Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-09-15
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The Chilean trade union movement offers one of Latin America's most instructive case studies in how authoritarian rule can durably reshape the institutional terrain on which labor politics unfolds long after democratic transition. More than five decades after the September 1973 coup that toppled Salvador Allende's Unidad Popular government, Chile remains a useful lens for understanding how dictatorship-era labor codes continue to constrain collective action even amid democratic consolidation and, more recently, signs of renewed labor mobilization. This matters acutely today: as global debates intensify over inequality, informalization, and the erosion of collective bargaining power, Chile's experience under the Pinochet regime (1973-1990) demonstrates how quickly authoritarian rulers can dismantle union power through legal engineering, and how stubbornly those legal architectures can persist even after the political system that produced them has been formally superseded. This is precisely the terrain examined by the article "Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d'État," published in Latin American Perspectives, which traces the arc from repression to institutional entrenchment to the tentative revitalization visible in contemporary Chilean labor politics.
At the center of the article's analysis is the 1979 Plan Laboral, the labor code imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship's civilian economic technocrats—the so-called "Chicago Boys"—as part of a broader neoliberal restructuring of the Chilean economy. The Plan Laboral was not merely a repressive instrument aimed at demobilizing unions in the immediate aftermath of the coup; it was a deliberately engineered institutional framework designed to fragment collective bargaining, decentralize it to the firm level, restrict the right to strike, and limit union federations' capacity to coordinate across sectors. By atomizing bargaining units and weakening the legal protections for union organizing, the Plan Laboral sought to make labor's demobilization self-sustaining rather than dependent on continued repression. This is the crux of what scholars of Chilean labor politics have long identified as the regime's most consequential and lasting legacy: unlike overt political repression, which can be reversed through democratic reform, a labor code embedded in ordinary legislation requires supermajorities or sustained political will to overturn—conditions that Chile's post-1990 governing coalitions, constrained by the binomial electoral system and elite pacts of the transition, were rarely able to muster. The article's framing—situating union weakness within a story of institutional path dependency rather than simply economic globalization or deindustrialization—aligns with a broader turn in comparative labor studies toward examining how authoritarian-origin institutions outlive the regimes that created them.
This case resonates strongly with broader patterns across Latin America and the Global South, where authoritarian and post-authoritarian transitions have left uneven imprints on civil society organizing capacity. Argentina, Brazil, and South Korea each experienced their own variants of labor repression under military or authoritarian rule, yet the trajectories of union revitalization in those countries diverged significantly from Chile's, in part because of differences in how thoroughly the legal architecture of labor relations was rewritten and how durably it survived democratization. Chile's particularly severe and comprehensive labor code overhaul—paired with a broader constitutional order, the 1980 Constitution, that entrenched neoliberal principles as quasi-constitutional commitments—produced what many scholars have called a "protected democracy," in which economic and social institutions were insulated from ordinary democratic contestation. This pattern is directly relevant to contemporary debates in development and civil society studies about the conditions under which subordinate social actors can reclaim associational power after long periods of institutional foreclosure. It also bears on donor and international-cooperation discussions about labor rights conditionality in trade agreements, since Chile's continued struggles with low unionization rates and fragmented bargaining have persisted despite the country's status as an OECD member and a frequent reference case for successful market liberalization.
The policy implications extend well beyond Chile's borders. For scholars and practitioners engaged in ODA, labor governance, and democratic consolidation research, the Chilean case underscores that formal democratization is an insufficient condition for restoring associational power once it has been legally and structurally dismantled. Reform efforts—such as Chile's 2016 labor reform under Michelle Bachelet, which sought to expand collective bargaining rights—illustrate both the possibilities and the limits of piecemeal legislative change against an entrenched institutional baseline. The article's attention to an "emerging revitalization" is significant precisely because it complicates a purely declensionist narrative of Chilean unionism as terminally weakened; instead, it invites attention to the social mobilizations of the past decade—including the 2019 estallido social and subsequent constitutional processes—as moments in which labor and civil society actors have sought, with mixed success, to renegotiate the terms of the post-dictatorship settlement. For international observers and civil society support organizations, this suggests that windows for institutional reform tend to open in conjunction with broader crises of legitimacy rather than through incremental legislative processes alone, a pattern with implications for how external actors calibrate support for labor rights advocacy in similarly constrained democratic contexts.
Looking forward, the Chilean case invites researchers to examine more closely the interplay between constitutional reform processes, labor law, and associational revitalization at a moment when Chile itself remains in an unsettled constitutional trajectory following the rejection of two proposed constitutional texts in 2022 and 2023. For practitioners working on civil society strengthening and labor rights in post-authoritarian or post-conflict settings more broadly, the lesson is that durable revitalization of collective action requires attention not only to political liberalization but to the specific legal architectures—labor codes, bargaining structures, strike regulations—that authoritarian regimes leave behind as their most consequential and least visible legacy. As global economic pressures continue to test the resilience of labor institutions even in established democracies, the Chilean trade union movement's slow, uneven struggle to reclaim bargaining power offers both a cautionary tale about the durability of authoritarian institutional design and a modest source of hope regarding civil society's capacity for renewal, even after five decades of structural constraint.