[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: 2026-09-21

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

The dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet fundamentally reordered Chile's system of labor relations, and more than half a century after the September 1973 coup, the institutional architecture it produced continues to shape how Chilean workers organize, negotiate, and contest power. This anniversary arrives at a moment when Latin America is once again grappling with the tension between formal democratic consolidation and the persistence of authoritarian-era economic institutions—a dynamic visible not only in Chile but across a region where neoliberal restructuring, often imposed under military or technocratic rule, left legal and normative residues that outlasted the regimes that created them. The article under review, published in Latin American Perspectives, situates Chilean trade unionism precisely within this long durée of institutional path dependency, asking how a labor movement that was once among the most powerful and politically consequential in Latin America was systematically dismantled, and what its recent, uneven revitalization tells us about the possibilities and limits of labor renewal under a hardened neoliberal constitutional order.

At the heart of the article's analysis is the 1979 Plan Laboral, the labor code engineered by José Piñera under Pinochet, which the piece treats not merely as a historical artifact but as a living institutional framework whose core logic—decentralized, enterprise-level bargaining; the legal permissibility of strikebreaking through worker replacement; the fragmentation of unions across multiple representative bodies within a single firm; and the exclusion of broader sectoral or national-level negotiation—continues to structure labor relations in Chile today. This is the crux of the "authoritarian legacies" framing in the title: unlike overtly repressive apparatuses that dissolve with a transition to democracy, labor law of this kind survives because it becomes naturalized as ordinary economic policy, defended not through coercion but through claims about competitiveness, flexibility, and macroeconomic stability. The article's contribution lies in tracing how successive post-1990 governments, including those led by the center-left Concertación and later coalitions, made only incremental modifications to this architecture, reflecting both the constraining power of the 1980 Constitution's economic provisions and a broader elite consensus around the model's supposed successes. The result, the authors argue, has been chronically low union density, weak strike capacity, and a labor movement structurally disconnected from the kind of encompassing bargaining power that characterized Chilean unionism prior to 1973, when the Central Única de Trabajadores operated as a significant political actor tightly linked to party politics and capable of shaping national economic policy.

Yet the article's subtitle signals that this is not simply a story of durable defeat. The "emerging revitalization" it identifies resonates with a broader pattern observable across Latin America and, indeed, other regions that experienced neoliberal shock therapy: episodic bursts of labor and social mobilization that erupt when accumulated grievances around inequality, precarity, and the cost of social reproduction reach a breaking point. Chile's 2019 estallido social is the obvious reference point, a moment in which subway fare increases detonated a much larger reckoning with pension privatization, privatized education and healthcare, and wage stagnation—all downstream consequences of the same 1980s institutional settlement the article examines. Trade unions were not the primary organizers of that uprising, which was notably horizontal and led by informal networks, students, and feminist and indigenous movements, but the article's attention to union revitalization suggests that organized labor has since sought to reposition itself within this new cycle of contention, leveraging the political opening created by the subsequent (ultimately failed) constitutional rewriting process and the election of a government with roots in student and social movements. This connects to a wider regional pattern in which labor movements in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia have similarly oscillated between institutional marginalization and moments of renewed assertiveness tied to leftward electoral shifts, even as none has fully reversed the structural fragmentation inherited from earlier periods of authoritarian or market-oriented restructuring.

For scholars of ODA, civil society, and political economy, this case carries significance well beyond Chile's borders. It illustrates how international development and governance frameworks that once championed labor flexibilization as a precondition for growth and investment attractiveness produced institutional legacies that now constrain the very civil society actors—unions among them—that donor and multilateral discourse increasingly identifies as essential partners for inclusive development and democratic resilience. The Chilean case is instructive for policymakers and development practitioners engaging with civil society strengthening programs in post-authoritarian or post-conflict settings: it demonstrates that formal democratic transition does not automatically restore associational capacity where economic and legal institutions were deliberately designed to atomize collective actors. Any serious effort to support labor and civil society revitalization in such contexts must contend with constitutional and statutory constraints that operate quietly, beneath the visible plane of electoral politics, and that require sustained legal and institutional reform rather than episodic mobilization alone to be genuinely undone.

Looking forward, the Chilean trade union movement's trajectory offers a useful barometer for both researchers and practitioners tracking the broader fate of labor rights within contemporary Latin American political economy. As Chile's government under Gabriel Boric has pursued modest labor reforms—including reduced working hours and efforts to strengthen collective bargaining—alongside a second, ultimately unsuccessful attempt at constitutional revision, the durability of Plan Laboral-era structures remains an open empirical question with direct bearing on debates about wage inequality, informal employment, and the future of social dialogue in the region. Researchers should attend closely to whether recent mobilizational energy translates into durable increases in union density and bargaining coverage or instead dissipates as a short-lived response to crisis, a pattern seen elsewhere in the region. For practitioners in development and civil society support, the lesson is that authoritarian institutional legacies are rarely dismantled through political transition alone; they require deliberate, sustained legal reform efforts that recognize labor organizing capacity as a foundational element of democratic and economic resilience, not a peripheral concern to be addressed once growth and stability are secured.

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