[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: 2026-09-22

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

The fiftieth anniversary of Chile's 1973 coup d'état passed in 2023, but the institutional architecture that General Augusto Pinochet's regime built to contain organized labor has proven far more durable than the dictatorship itself. This is the central problem taken up by a forthcoming article in Latin American Perspectives, "Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d'État," scheduled for Volume 53, Issue 4 (July 2026), pages 67-87. The timing is significant: more than five decades after the September 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende's Unidad Popular government, and amid a Chilean political landscape still shaped by debates over constitutional reform, the article's central question—how deeply authoritarian labor institutions continue to structure union life even under democratic governments—speaks directly to current controversies over inequality, precarious work, and the limits of Chile's post-1990 democratic transition.

The article's analytical core is the Plan Laboral de 1979, the 1979 Labor Plan imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship, which the authors identify as the foundational mechanism through which authoritarian rule reshaped Chilean industrial relations. Rather than simply banning unions outright, the Plan Laboral restructured collective bargaining at the enterprise level, fragmented union representation, and curtailed the right to strike, embedding a model of decentralized, employer-favorable labor relations into Chilean law. According to the article's framing, these politico-economic and institutional changes did not disappear with the return to democracy in 1990; instead they became sedimented as a durable legal and organizational legacy that has constrained Chilean trade unionism for over four decades. This argument situates the piece within a broader scholarly tradition that treats authoritarian-era institutions as "sticky"—resistant to reversal even after formal democratization—and it uses the Chilean labor movement as a concrete empirical site to trace how that stickiness operates in practice, from bargaining structure down to union density and organizational capacity.

Beyond the historical-institutional argument, the article's title points to an "emerging revitalization," suggesting the analysis does not end in stasis but identifies signs of renewed labor mobilization within the constraints inherited from the dictatorship. This framing resonates with a wider pattern across Latin America and other post-authoritarian contexts, where labor movements have periodically re-emerged as vehicles of political contestation even after decades of institutional weakening—visible in Chile itself during the 2019 social uprising (estallido social) and the subsequent constitutional process, both of which drew heavily on questions of labor rights, pensions, and social inequality tracing back to the neoliberal economic model consolidated under Pinochet. By anchoring its analysis in the specific legal architecture of the Plan Laboral rather than treating "authoritarian legacy" as an abstraction, the article offers a template that researchers of civil society and labor politics elsewhere in the region—Argentina, Brazil, or Uruguay, each with its own trajectory of dictatorship and union repression—could use for comparative work on how labor law reform, or its absence, shapes post-transition civil society.

For institutions like IOCSS that track civil society development and political economy across regions receiving official development assistance, this article carries implications beyond Chile's borders. Labor unions are a core component of civil society infrastructure, and donor and development institutions engaged in governance, labor rights, or private-sector development programming in post-authoritarian or post-conflict states often assume that formal democratization restores civic institutional capacity. The Chilean case, as analyzed here through the lens of the 1979 Labor Plan, complicates that assumption: it shows that specific legal instruments enacted under authoritarian rule can outlive the regime that created them by decades, continuing to shape the bargaining power of workers and the density of civil society organizations long after elections resume. This has direct relevance for policy design around ODA-funded governance and labor-rights programming, which should account for the durability of institutional legacies rather than treating "transition to democracy" as a clean institutional reset.

Looking forward, the article's dual framing—authoritarian legacy alongside emerging revitalization—invites researchers and practitioners to move past a simple binary of institutional continuity versus rupture and instead examine the specific mechanisms, such as enterprise-level bargaining restrictions inherited from the Plan Laboral de 1979, through which change does or does not occur. For scholars of Latin American political economy, the piece adds empirical depth to debates over how the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 coup has prompted renewed reckoning with Pinochet-era institutions across multiple sectors, not only labor. For practitioners engaged in civil society strengthening or labor-rights advocacy, the lesson is that legal and institutional reform—not merely political liberalization—is often the necessary condition for revitalizing organized labor's capacity to act as a counterweight within a democratic system. As Chile continues to navigate the aftermath of its rejected and revised constitutional drafts, and as unions there test the limits of a labor code still bearing the imprint of 1979, this article offers a case study in how authoritarian institutional legacies persist, and how they might eventually be unwound.

Read the original article →