[LAP] Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d’État

Source: Latin American Perspectives  |  Published: 2026-09-17

Category: 정권·선거 변동  |  Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional

The Chilean trade union movement's trajectory since the 1973 coup remains a critical lens for understanding how authoritarian institutional design can outlast the regimes that create it, and this question has taken on renewed urgency as Latin America navigates a wave of social unrest, democratic backsliding, and contested efforts at labor reform. More than five decades after General Augusto Pinochet's military junta overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, Chile continues to grapple with the institutional residue of that dictatorship—nowhere more visibly than in the architecture of its labor relations system. As global attention turns to the fragility of democratic institutions and the durability of authoritarian legacies in shaping economic governance, the Chilean case offers a striking illustration of how legal and institutional frameworks imposed under coercion can constrain collective action long after formal democracy is restored, while also revealing the conditions under which such constraints begin to erode.

At the heart of this analysis lies the 1979 Labor Plan (Plan Laboral), the signature labor reform engineered by the Pinochet regime's civilian technocrats, most notably José Piñera, as part of a broader neoliberal restructuring of the Chilean economy. The Plan Laboral was designed not merely to suppress unions in the immediate aftermath of the coup but to permanently reconfigure the legal and institutional terrain on which labor and capital would interact. By decentralizing collective bargaining to the enterprise level, restricting the right to strike, limiting the scope of union federations and confederations, and introducing mechanisms that fragmented worker solidarity across firms and sectors, the reform effectively dismantled the centralized, politically engaged union movement that had characterized Chile prior to 1973. Crucially, much of this framework survived the 1990 transition to democracy largely intact, embedded within a constitutional order—the 1980 Constitution—that made structural labor reform extraordinarily difficult to achieve through ordinary legislative means. This persistence illustrates a broader theoretical point about authoritarian legacies: dictatorships do not simply repress opposition during their tenure but can encode their preferences into institutions that continue to shape political and economic outcomes for generations, effectively privatizing the terms of labor conflict long after the guns have been put away.

This dynamic resonates far beyond Chile's borders and speaks to broader patterns in the political economy of ODA-recipient and middle-income countries across the Global South, where authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian episodes have similarly left behind labor codes, tax structures, and regulatory frameworks that outlive the regimes that created them. Scholars of civil society and development have increasingly recognized that formal democratization—elections, constitutions, civilian oversight—does not automatically translate into the revitalization of associational life or the redistribution of bargaining power between labor and capital. In this sense, the Chilean trade union movement functions as a case study in the broader literature on "authoritarian legacies," alongside comparable experiences in South Korea, Indonesia, and parts of post-communist Eastern Europe, where labor movements have had to rebuild organizational capacity within institutional environments explicitly designed to prevent their resurgence. For international donors, development agencies, and civil society support organizations, this underscores a persistent challenge: promoting genuine civic and labor pluralism in post-authoritarian contexts requires attention not just to formal democratic procedures but to the deeper institutional architecture that structures who can organize, how, and with what leverage.

The article's framing of an "emerging revitalization" alongside enduring authoritarian legacies is particularly significant, as it resists both a narrative of permanent labor weakness and one of triumphant post-transition recovery. Chile has witnessed important inflection points—the 2019 estallido social (social uprising), the subsequent constitutional convention process, and periodic legislative efforts to reform aspects of the labor code—that have opened political space for unions to reassert themselves as actors in national debates over inequality, pensions, and social protection. Yet these openings have been uneven and frequently contested, reflecting the continued weight of institutional path dependency even amid genuine social mobilization. This tension between structural constraint and agency-driven revitalization mirrors debates in the broader civil society literature about whether grassroots mobilization can meaningfully overcome institutionalized power asymmetries in the absence of sustained legal and constitutional reform, or whether episodic protest movements risk dissipating without durable institutional translation.

From a policy standpoint, the implications are substantial for both domestic reformers and international actors engaged in labor governance and development cooperation. Efforts to modernize Chilean labor law—including recent debates over collective bargaining coverage, the reduction of the working week, and pension system reform—cannot be understood in isolation from this longer institutional history; any reform agenda must contend with a legal and political culture still shaped by decades of decentralized, enterprise-level bargaining logic. For multilateral organizations, bilateral donors, and international labor bodies such as the ILO, the Chilean case reinforces the importance of supporting not only immediate labor rights protections but also the longer-term project of institutional and constitutional reform, since piecemeal legislative adjustments are unlikely to fully dislodge deeply embedded structural constraints. It also cautions against treating "democratic consolidation" as a static achievement rather than an ongoing process in which the terms of economic citizenship remain actively contested.

Looking forward, researchers and practitioners alike would do well to treat the Chilean trade union movement not as a settled case of post-authoritarian recovery but as an ongoing experiment in institutional renegotiation, one whose outcome remains genuinely open more than fifty years after the coup. The interplay between constitutional reform efforts, generational shifts in union leadership, and evolving labor market structures—including the rise of precarious and platform-based employment—will likely determine whether the revitalization identified in this scholarship consolidates into durable organizational power or remains a partial and reversible opening. For scholars of comparative political economy, Chile offers a rich vantage point for examining how authoritarian institutional legacies interact with democratic renewal, while for policymakers and civil society actors across the region, it serves as a reminder that dismantling the residual architecture of dictatorship is rarely a matter of formal transition alone, but a protracted struggle over the rules that continue to govern economic and social life long after democracy has nominally returned.

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