[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: 2026-09-23

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

The 2019 explosion of protest that swept through Santiago's metro stations and spread into a sustained cycle of constitutional reckoning did not emerge from nowhere; it drew on decades of accumulated grievance against an economic model built, in large part, on the deliberate weakening of organized labor. It is against this backdrop that a new article in Latin American Perspectives, published in Volume 53, Issue 4 (July 2026, pages 67-87), under the title "Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d'État," returns to the foundational moment of that model: the 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende and installed the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which held power until 1990. More than fifty years on, the article argues, Chile's labor movement remains shaped by institutional architecture imposed during that seventeen-year period, even as new signs of union revitalization have begun to appear. For an institute focused on civil society and global political economy, this anniversary framing is a useful reminder that authoritarian institutional legacies do not expire on a fixed calendar; they persist in labor codes, bargaining structures, and organizational capacity long after formal democratic transition.

The article's central empirical anchor is the Plan Laboral de 1979, the 1979 Labor Plan enacted under Pinochet, which the piece identifies as the decisive instrument through which the dictatorship reengineered Chilean industrial relations. Rather than simply banning unions outright, the Plan Laboral restructured the legal terrain of labor relations—fragmenting collective bargaining to the enterprise level, restricting the right to strike, and limiting union federations' capacity to coordinate across sectors—in ways designed to survive the eventual return to civilian rule. The article's core argument is that this design succeeded: Chile's post-1990 democratic governments largely left the Plan Laboral's core architecture intact, meaning that the coup's institutional afterlife has outlasted the dictatorship itself by more than three decades. This is a significant analytical move because it shifts attention away from the coup as a discrete historical rupture and toward the coup as the origin point of a durable, self-reproducing institutional order—one that continued to structure labor politics under both center-left Concertación governments and later administrations.

This pattern is not unique to Chile, and the article's framing invites comparison with the broader trajectory of labor and civil society politics across Latin America's post-authoritarian states, where transitional governments frequently prioritized macroeconomic stability and elite reconciliation over the reconstruction of associational power that dictatorships had dismantled. Chile is often cited in the ODA and development-policy literature as the paradigmatic case of neoliberal restructuring under authoritarian cover, and the persistence of the Plan Laboral's logic through the Concertación years and beyond is frequently invoked as evidence that formal democratization is a necessary but insufficient condition for restoring the bargaining power of organized labor. The article's contribution is to update this well-worn narrative with a claim about the present moment: that after five decades, the balance may be shifting, with what the title calls an "emerging revitalization" of union activity running alongside, and in tension with, the still-standing authoritarian legacy. This is consistent with the trajectory visible in Chile's own recent political cycle, including the 2019 social uprising and the subsequent, ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to draft a new constitution—episodes in which labor and social movement actors reasserted themselves as political protagonists after decades of relative institutional constraint.

For researchers and practitioners working on civil society strengthening and labor-rights components of development cooperation, the article's periodization matters. Programs that treat democratic transition as the endpoint of institutional reform risk underestimating how long dictatorship-era labor codes can persist by default, simply because no subsequent government prioritized their revision. The Plan Laboral's survival across multiple elected administrations is a caution against assuming that formal regime change automatically restores pre-authoritarian associational capacity; in Chile's case, the specific legal architecture of enterprise-level bargaining and constrained strike rights required decades before it became a live target of reform debate. This has direct implications for how donors and multilateral institutions design civil-society and labor-governance interventions in post-authoritarian or post-conflict settings: technical assistance aimed at labor-law reform may need to be sustained over a much longer time horizon than typical project cycles allow, since the political window for revisiting dictatorship-era statutes can take generations to open, if it opens at all.

The article's account of "emerging revitalization" also raises a methodological point of interest for scholars of civil society: the same institutional structures that were designed to atomize labor can, under certain conditions, become the very terrain on which new forms of mobilization are organized—enterprise-level unions coordinating informally across firms, or leveraging moments of national political crisis such as 2019 to press demands that the Plan Laboral's architecture was designed to foreclose. Tracing how Chilean unions have navigated—and in places circumvented—the constraints inherited from 1979 offers a case study in institutional adaptation that resonates well beyond Chile's borders, informing how researchers assess labor movement capacity in other Latin American and post-authoritarian contexts where similar legal residues of dictatorship remain on the books.

Looking ahead, the more than fifty-year vantage point adopted by this article is itself a methodological statement: it insists that assessments of authoritarian legacy and post-authoritarian civil society renewal require long time horizons rather than snapshots tied to transition anniversaries. For IOCSS's own research agenda on ODA, civil society, and political economy, the Chilean case—anchored in the concrete, datable instrument of the Plan Laboral de 1979 and the equally concrete rupture of the 1973 coup—offers a template for evaluating whether current programming aimed at strengthening labor and civil society organizations in other post-authoritarian states is calibrated to the actual pace at which institutional legacies erode, or persist. As Chile continues to negotiate its unresolved constitutional and labor-law questions in the years following the 2019 uprising, the trajectory the article traces will remain an important reference point for practitioners assessing how, and how slowly, associational power can be rebuilt after decades of deliberate institutional constraint.

Read the original article →