[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: 2026-09-19

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

The end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990 did not simply restore Chilean democracy; it left in place an institutional architecture of labor relations that has proven remarkably durable, and understanding that legacy has taken on renewed urgency as Chile passes the fifty-year mark since the September 1973 coup. In a moment when Latin America is again debating the role of organized labor in addressing inequality—amid Chile's own constitutional upheavals, the 2019 social uprising, and a broader regional reassessment of neoliberal orthodoxy—the question of why Chilean unions remain comparatively weak, fragmented, and marginal to national policymaking is not an antiquarian concern but a live political one. This article's examination of the trade union movement's trajectory from dictatorship to the present arrives precisely as scholars and policymakers are trying to determine whether Chile's much-discussed "social explosion" and subsequent constitutional processes have opened genuine space for labor revitalization or whether authoritarian-era constraints continue to structure the boundaries of the possible.

At the center of the analysis is the 1979 Plan Laboral, the labor code imposed by the military government's economic team, which the article treats not as a discrete historical episode but as an ongoing architecture of demobilization. The Plan Laboral fragmented collective bargaining down to the enterprise level, prohibited sectoral and industry-wide negotiation, permitted employers to hire strikebreakers during legal strikes, and imposed strict limits on the duration and scope of labor conflict. These provisions were designed explicitly to atomize the union movement that had been central to the Popular Unity coalition's mobilizational base under Salvador Allende, and to ensure that even after an eventual return to civilian rule, labor could never again function as a cohesive political actor capable of contesting the market-oriented model. The article's contribution lies in tracing how successive democratic governments—from the Concertación coalitions of the 1990s and 2000s through more recent center-left administrations—modified but never fundamentally dismantled this framework, leaving Chile with one of the lowest unionization and collective bargaining coverage rates in Latin America despite decades of formal democratic governance. This continuity across radically different political administrations is itself the article's central puzzle: institutional legacies imposed under authoritarianism proved more resilient than the democratic transition that was supposed to supersede them.

This pattern resonates with broader debates in comparative political economy about the durability of authoritarian institutional legacies and the limits of democratization when it is not accompanied by deep structural reform. Chile has long been held up, particularly by international financial institutions, as the paradigmatic case of successful market transition and democratic consolidation in the Global South. Yet the persistent weakness of its labor movement complicates that narrative considerably, suggesting that formal democratic transition can coexist indefinitely with substantive constraints on collective action that were designed by authoritarian actors precisely to survive them. This has clear resonance elsewhere in the region and beyond: in post-authoritarian contexts from South Korea to South Africa to various Eastern European cases, scholars have documented similar tensions between political liberalization and the persistence of labor-repressive economic institutions. For civil society and ODA-focused researchers, the Chilean case is instructive because it illustrates that donor and multilateral emphasis on formal democratic indicators—elections, constitutional government, rule of law—can obscure the extent to which authoritarian-era economic institutions continue to shape the distribution of power between capital and labor long after transition.

The article's attention to what it terms an "emerging revitalization" is significant because it pushes back against a purely declensionist narrative of Chilean unionism as permanently and irreversibly weakened. The 2019 estallido social, the subsequent constitutional conventions, and a wave of sectoral labor actions—particularly in mining, education, and public services—have generated new forms of union coordination and a renewed public legitimacy for collective action that did not exist a decade earlier. Whether this constitutes a durable shift or a conjunctural mobilization tied to a specific political moment is an open empirical question, and one with significant implications for how researchers model the relationship between mass protest movements and formal labor organization. The article's framing suggests that revitalization, where it is occurring, operates less through the parliamentary reform of the Plan Laboral's core provisions—reform efforts have repeatedly stalled or been diluted in Congress—and more through informal coalition-building, cross-sectoral solidarity networks, and the strategic use of public opinion generated by the broader cycle of contention since 2019.

For policymakers and practitioners working on labor rights, civil society strengthening, and inclusive development in Latin America, this analysis carries several implications. First, it underscores that labor law reform cannot be treated as a technical or incremental matter when the underlying framework was constructed as an instrument of political control; genuine revitalization likely requires confronting the enterprise-level bargaining structure and strikebreaker provisions directly rather than through peripheral adjustments. Second, it suggests that international development and governance assessments of Chile—and by extension other post-authoritarian middle-income countries—should incorporate labor institutional analysis as a core indicator of democratic quality, not a secondary social policy concern. Finally, as Chile continues to navigate its unfinished constitutional debates and as other countries in the region confront their own authoritarian labor legacies, this fiftieth-anniversary reassessment offers a valuable comparative benchmark: it demonstrates both how deeply authoritarian institutional design can outlast the regimes that created it, and how contentious politics from below can still, decades later, reopen questions that formal democratic transition left unresolved. Researchers and practitioners tracking civil society revitalization across the region would do well to treat the Chilean union movement not as a settled case of post-transition weakness but as an active site of institutional contestation whose outcome remains genuinely uncertain.

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