[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: 2026-09-20

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

The 2019 social uprising in Chile, followed by a constitutional rewriting process and the election of a former student and labor activist to the presidency, drew renewed international attention to a set of institutions many observers had assumed were permanently subordinated to market orthodoxy. Chief among these is organized labor, whose weakness has long been treated as a defining and durable feature of the post-Pinochet order. Fifty years after the 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, the question of whether Chilean trade unionism can meaningfully revitalize itself, or whether it remains structurally hemmed in by rules designed four decades ago, is not merely of historical interest. It bears directly on debates across Latin America and the Global South about how authoritarian-era economic architectures continue to shape democratic possibilities long after formal transitions to civilian rule, and about whether labor can serve as a counterweight to the entrenched neoliberal consensus that so many ODA-recipient and middle-income economies still operate within.

The article under review, appearing in Latin American Perspectives, situates its analysis at the intersection of institutional legacy and emergent agency. Its central object is the Plan Laboral of 1979, the labor code imposed under Pinochet that fragmented collective bargaining to the enterprise level, restricted the right to strike, permitted the hiring of strikebreakers, and more broadly redesigned industrial relations around the premise that unions were an obstacle to efficient labor markets rather than legitimate representatives of workers' interests. What makes this framework so consequential, and what the article evidently seeks to demonstrate, is its remarkable durability: despite more than three decades of democratic governance since 1990, successive center-left and right-wing administrations alike left the core architecture of the Plan Laboral largely intact, modifying it only incrementally. This is the analytical crux of the "authoritarian legacies" framing that recurs throughout scholarship on Chile's transition literature—the recognition that formal democratization did not automatically dismantle the economic and institutional scaffolding erected to prevent exactly the kind of mass working-class mobilization that had characterized Chilean politics before 1973. By anchoring its analysis in this longue durée of institutional path dependency, the article contributes to a broader literature, associated with scholars such as Peter Winn and Volker Frank, that treats Chilean labor's weakness not as a natural market outcome but as the product of deliberate, engineered depoliticization.

At the same time, the article's title signals an important corrective to purely structuralist accounts: it points toward an "emerging revitalization" that complicates any narrative of simple continuity. This dual framing resonates with a wider shift in Latin American labor studies away from declension narratives—which dominated the 1990s and 2000s amid deindustrialization, informalization, and the global retreat of union density—toward attention to new forms of worker organizing that operate outside, or in creative tension with, inherited legal frameworks. In the Chilean case, this likely includes phenomena such as the resurgence of subcontracted copper miners' strikes, organizing among precarious service and platform workers, feminist-inflected labor activism following the 2018 university mobilizations, and the broader politicization of social rights that culminated in the 2019 estallido social. That uprising, though not reducible to a labor movement, created an opening in which questions of collective bargaining, pension privatization, and wage inequality reentered mainstream political discourse in ways unthinkable a decade earlier. The article's contribution, then, appears to lie in tracing how these newer mobilizational energies interact with, are constrained by, or occasionally circumvent the institutional residue of the Plan Laboral—a tension between structure and agency that is central to contemporary social movement theory.

Placed in comparative regional perspective, Chile's trajectory illuminates a pattern visible across much of Latin America and, more broadly, in states that underwent structural adjustment under authoritarian or technocratic tutelage: the persistence of labor-repressive institutional design well past the moment of formal democratization. Countries as varied as South Korea under its own post-authoritarian labor law reforms, or Central American economies whose export-processing zones inherited restrictive labor codes, offer analogous cases in which economic liberalization and political closure were bundled together in ways that outlived the regimes that created them. For the ODA and international development community, this raises a pointed methodological challenge: governance and civil-society indicators that treat "democratic consolidation" as a binary achieved milestone risk obscuring the ways in which labor rights—an integral component of civil society vitality and the ILO's decent work agenda—remain hostage to inherited legal architectures. Institutions such as the OECD, ILO, and bilateral donors engaged in labor-market governance programming in Latin America would do well to treat Chile not as a success story of democratic transition but as a cautionary illustration of how quickly formal political liberalization can decouple from substantive socioeconomic rights.

The policy implications extend beyond Chile's borders. As the country's constitutional process continues to grapple, in fits and starts, with how to encode labor and social rights more robustly, the fate of any reform to the Plan Laboral will function as a bellwether for whether the broader Chilean political system remains capable of reversing authoritarian-era economic settlements through ordinary democratic channels, or whether such reversals require extraordinary constitutional moments to succeed at all. For scholars, the article's framing invites further comparative research into which conditions—leadership renewal within union confederations, alliance-building with new social movements, sectoral leverage in strategic industries such as copper, or shifts in the composition of the labor force—most reliably convert institutional constraint into mobilizational capacity. For practitioners working in civil society strengthening and labor-rights programming, the Chilean case underscores that revitalization is neither automatic nor irreversible: it is contingent, uneven across sectors, and vulnerable to reversal should political winds shift rightward again, as they periodically have since 1990. Fifty years after the coup, Chilean trade unionism thus stands as a live laboratory for understanding how authoritarian legacies interact with democratic renewal—a case study whose lessons merit close attention well beyond the Southern Cone.

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