[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: 2026-09-24

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

On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet's coup against President Salvador Allende inaugurated a seventeen-year dictatorship that fundamentally reshaped Chile's labor relations, and more than five decades later that legacy remains a live subject of scholarly inquiry. 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" (Volume 53, Issue 4, pages 67–87, July 2026), returns to this history to ask how institutional structures imposed under military rule continue to constrain—and, in some respects, are now being challenged by—organized labor in contemporary Chile. The timing of this scholarship is significant: as Chile marked the fiftieth anniversary of the coup in 2023 amid renewed public debate over constitutional reform, the question of whether authoritarian-era labor institutions can be dismantled through democratic means has taken on fresh political urgency for researchers of civil society and political economy across Latin America.

At the analytical core of the article is the Plan Laboral de 1979 (the 1979 Labor Plan), the labor code drafted under Pinochet's economic team that decentralized collective bargaining to the enterprise level, restricted the right to strike, and fragmented union structures so as to weaken class-based solidarity. The article traces how this institutional architecture was designed not merely as a technical labor-market reform but as a deliberate political project to dismantle the union movement that had been central to Popular Unity–era mobilization under Allende. By examining the politico-economic and institutional changes imposed during 1973–1990, the study situates Chilean trade unionism within the broader neoliberal transformation that made Chile a global laboratory for market-oriented restructuring—a transformation whose labor provisions survived largely intact well into the post-transition democratic period after 1990, even as other authoritarian-era institutions were gradually reformed.

This focus on institutional persistence connects directly to wider debates in the ODA, civil society, and political economy literature on how authoritarian legacies constrain civic and associational life long after formal democratization. Chile is frequently cited in comparative political economy as the paradigmatic case of a "subsidiary state" model, where labor and civil-society organizations were structurally weakened to make way for private-sector-led growth, and where subsequent democratic governments faced high political costs in reversing that architecture. The article's emphasis on "authoritarian legacies" alongside "emerging revitalization" mirrors a pattern observed elsewhere in the region and beyond—from Argentina's post-dictatorship labor federations to South Korea's post-authoritarian union movements—where the endurance of institutional design choices made under repressive regimes shapes decades of subsequent civil-society organizing capacity, regardless of formal regime change. For institutions like IOCSS that track the relationship between political regime transitions and civil society space, the Chilean case offers a long-duration dataset for assessing how quickly, or how slowly, associational rights recover once institutional gatekeeping is loosened.

The policy implications flagged by this research are considerable for both domestic reformers and international observers of Chilean political economy. Chile's 2019 estallido social (social uprising) and the subsequent, ultimately unsuccessful, 2022 constitutional referendum both placed labor rights and the legacies of the Plan Laboral squarely on the national agenda, and the government of President Gabriel Boric has since pursued incremental labor reforms, including a 2023 law reducing the standard work week to forty hours. The article's account of institutional continuity helps explain why such reforms have proceeded gradually rather than through wholesale repeal of the 1979 framework: entrenched enterprise-level bargaining structures and fragmented union representation create durable political-economic constituencies resistant to re-centralization of collective bargaining. For researchers and policymakers engaged with ODA-funded labor and governance programs in Latin America, this suggests that technical assistance aimed at strengthening freedom of association must contend with deeply embedded legal architecture, not simply with formal democratic backsliding or restoration.

Looking forward, the article's framing of an "emerging revitalization" alongside persistent authoritarian legacies invites practitioners and scholars to treat Chilean trade unionism as a case of contested, uneven institutional change rather than linear recovery. As the fiftieth-anniversary retrospectives on the 1973 coup continue to generate historical reassessment across Chilean civil society, and as debates over labor code reform remain active within Boric's government, researchers tracking civil society revitalization in post-authoritarian contexts would do well to monitor whether Chile's experience—shaped so decisively by the Plan Laboral de 1979—becomes a model for gradual institutional unwinding or remains a cautionary tale about the durability of authoritarian design. For the broader IOCSS research agenda on civil society and political economy in the Global South, the Chilean case underscores that formal transitions to democracy do not automatically restore associational power, and that sustained scholarly attention to labor institutions—rather than electoral cycles alone—is essential to understanding the true pace of authoritarian-legacy reversal.

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