[LAP] Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d’État
Latin American Perspectives, Volume 53, Issue 4, Page 67-87, July 2026. This article analyzes how the politico-economic and institutional changes imposed by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) have affected Chilean trade unionism. It explores how the Plan Laboral de
Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-09-26
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
Chile's trade union movement enters the second half of 2026 as an unresolved test case for how deeply authoritarian institutional design can outlast the regime that created it. More than five decades after the 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende and installed Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship (1973-1990), 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," slated for Volume 53, Issue 4 (July 2026, pp. 67-87) — returns to a question that has animated Latin American labor studies for a generation: why did Chilean unionism fail to recover the density and bargaining power it held before 1973, even after the return to democracy? The timing is not incidental. As Chile continues to debate labor-code reform, pension privatization's legacy, and the aftershocks of the 2019 social uprising, the anniversary of the coup offers a natural vantage point from which to reassess whether the country's post-dictatorship labor institutions were ever built for workers' collective strength in the first place.
The article's central analytical move is to trace Chile's weak union landscape directly to the institutional architecture imposed by the dictatorship, above all the Plan Laboral de 1979 (1979 Labor Plan). Drafted under Pinochet and associated with the technocratic "Chicago Boys" project of radical market liberalization, the Plan Laboral restructured industrial relations around enterprise-level bargaining, restricted the right to strike, fragmented union representation, and deliberately weakened federations' and confederations' capacity to coordinate across sectors. The article's framing — "authoritarian legacies" juxtaposed against an "emerging revitalization" — signals that this is not simply a historical retrospective but an argument about institutional path dependency: rules written by a dictatorship to demobilize labor continued to structure the incentives and constraints facing Chilean unions long after 1990, even through successive Concertación and center-left governments that promised reform. This is a familiar move in the historical-institutionalist literature on labor politics, but the article's distinctive contribution, per its abstract, is to hold that legacy in tension with signs of contemporary revitalization — implying that recent mobilizational energy, rather than incremental legal reform alone, is what has begun to crack open space long foreclosed by the Plan Laboral's design.
Read alongside broader currents in Latin American political economy, the Chilean case functions as an instructive counterpoint to regional narratives about post-dictatorship "transitional" reform. Where transitional-justice literature on Argentina or Brazil often foregrounds accountability mechanisms and truth commissions, the Chilean labor story foregrounds a subtler form of authoritarian durability: an economic constitution — enshrined via the Plan Laboral and reinforced by the 1980 Constitution — that survived the transition largely intact because pacted democratization prioritized macroeconomic continuity over the dismantling of Pinochet-era labor law. This resonates with a wider pattern across the region in which neoliberal restructuring imposed under authoritarian or crisis conditions (structural adjustment in the 1980s-90s) proved far stickier than the political regimes that introduced it, constraining civil society and union actors well into democratic periods. The article's framing of Chile "more than 50 years since the coup" invites comparison with how other Southern Cone labor movements — Argentine peronist unionism, Brazilian sindicalismo — negotiated different trajectories out of dictatorship, and why Chile's enterprise-based bargaining model proved unusually resistant to reconsolidation at the sectoral or national level.
For researchers and practitioners in the ODA and civil-society-strengthening space, the implications extend beyond Chile's borders. Institutions such as the ILO, regional development banks, and bilateral donors that fund "decent work" and labor-rights programming often treat union revitalization as a matter of legal reform or capacity-building support to existing federations. This article's emphasis on the Plan Laboral's structural legacy suggests that such interventions risk being insufficient if they do not confront the enterprise-level bargaining architecture itself — a caution relevant to any donor or technical-assistance program advising on labor-code modernization in post-authoritarian or post-conflict settings, where formally democratic labor law can still encode demobilizing design choices inherited from a prior regime. The Chilean case also underscores why civil society researchers tracking "정권·선거 변동" (regime and electoral change) dynamics should treat labor institutions as a distinct and durable layer of authoritarian legacy, separate from and sometimes outlasting formal democratic transition, constitutional reform, or electoral turnover.
Looking forward, the article's pairing of "authoritarian legacies" with "emerging revitalization" points to an open research and policy agenda rather than a closed verdict. If Chilean unions are indeed showing renewed mobilizational capacity — plausibly linked to the cycle of contention since the 2019 estallido social and subsequent constitutional debates — then the key questions for both scholars and practitioners become which specific mechanisms (legal reform, sectoral bargaining pilots, union federation coordination, or grassroots organizing outside the Plan Laboral's enterprise frame) are actually driving that revitalization, and whether they are durable enough to survive electoral cycles. For IOCSS's own work tracking civil society and institutional change across regions with authoritarian pasts, the Chilean trade union case, as reconstructed in this Latin American Perspectives article, offers a methodologically useful template: measuring democratic consolidation not only by elections and constitutions but by whether the everyday institutional machinery of economic life — labor law chief among it — has actually been rebuilt to reflect a post-authoritarian settlement, fifty years on.