[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: 2026-09-27

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

The fifty-third anniversary of the September 11, 1973 coup against Salvador Allende arrived with renewed international attention to Chile's labor institutions, and it is against this backdrop that Latin American Perspectives publishes, in its Volume 53, Issue 4 edition of July 2026 (pages 67-87), an analysis titled "Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d'État." The timing is not incidental: more than half a century after General Augusto Pinochet's military junta overthrew a democratically elected government, Chile remains a reference case for how authoritarian regimes reshape labor relations in ways that outlast the dictatorships themselves. For an institute like IOCSS that tracks the interplay between political regimes, civil society, and development outcomes, the Chilean case offers a rare longitudinal window: few countries allow scholars to trace union fortunes across a coup, seventeen years of military rule, thirty-six years of formal democracy, and two attempted constitutional rewrites, all while the original labor architecture imposed under dictatorship remains substantially intact.

At the center of the article's analysis is the Plan Laboral de 1979 (1979 Labor Plan), the signature institutional intervention through which the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) restructured Chilean industrial relations. Designed under the technocratic influence of the "Chicago Boys" and formally authored under Labor Minister José Piñera, the Plan Laboral decentralized collective bargaining to the enterprise level, curtailed the right to strike, prohibited inter-firm and sectoral negotiation, and fragmented union representation into competing shop-level organizations. The article's framing—situating "authoritarian legacies" alongside an "emerging revitalization"—signals a dual argument rather than a simple story of decline: the piece appears to hold that the legal and institutional skeleton erected in 1979 has proven remarkably durable across Chile's democratic transition after 1990, even as new organizing dynamics within the labor movement have begun to challenge that inherited framework. This is a significant historiographical move, because much of the existing literature on Chilean unionism has emphasized either the dictatorship's repressive machinery or the post-1990 Concertación governments' failure to fully dismantle it; a piece marking the 50-year milestone that foregrounds revitalization suggests the author sees meaningful agency emerging from within a still-constraining institutional shell.

This argument resonates with broader regional trends in Latin American political economy that IOCSS has tracked in adjacent contexts. Chile's principal labor confederation, the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), founded in 1988 in the dictatorship's final years, has operated for decades within the bargaining limits set by the Plan Laboral, a constraint shared in structural spirit—if not in specific legal form—by labor federations across other countries that experienced authoritarian corporatist projects, from the Brazilian military regime's control of union financing to South Korea's developmental-state suppression of independent unions before 1987. In Chile specifically, the post-2019 estallido social protests and the subsequent, ultimately unsuccessful constitutional conventions of 2022 and 2023 reopened public debate over the 1980 Constitution's socioeconomic architecture, of which labor law was always an integral pillar. The election of Gabriel Boric, who took office in March 2022 on a platform explicitly critical of the Pinochet-era economic model, and his government's subsequent passage of a law in April 2023 to reduce the standard work week from 45 to 40 hours, both indicate that Chilean labor politics remains an active site of contestation rather than a settled historical question. The article's contribution is to locate the trade union movement itself—rather than electoral or constitutional politics—as the terrain where these authoritarian legacies are being tested.

For policy audiences and researchers, the analytical stakes are considerable. Scholars of democratization have long debated whether formally democratic successor states can neutralize the institutional legacies of authoritarian predecessors, and Chilean labor law is frequently cited as a textbook case of institutional "lock-in," in which constitutional supermajority requirements and entrenched legal defaults preserved dictatorship-era arrangements well after the transition to civilian rule in 1990. A study appearing in Latin American Perspectives—a journal with a long-standing engagement with dependency theory, critical political economy, and labor history in the region since its founding in the 1970s—situates itself squarely within debates over whether decentralized, enterprise-level bargaining regimes of the kind codified in the Plan Laboral are compatible with meaningful freedom of association as protected under International Labour Organization conventions, including Convention 87 on freedom of association and Convention 98 on collective bargaining, both of which Chile has ratified but whose implementation critics have long questioned. For development and civil-society researchers, the piece also matters because trade unions constitute one of the most institutionally durable forms of organized civil society in Latin America, meaning that any assessment of "revitalization" carries implications well beyond labor policy narrowly defined, touching on the broader health of associational life in a post-authoritarian society.

Looking forward, both practitioners and researchers have reason to treat the Chilean case as a live rather than closed question. If the article's account of an "emerging revitalization" is borne out by subsequent organizing data, it would suggest that legal architectures inherited from authoritarian rule—however durable—are not necessarily deterministic of long-run civil society outcomes, a finding with relevance for other post-authoritarian contexts where labor law reform remains politically difficult. Practitioners engaged in labor rights advocacy, ODA-linked governance programming, or comparative civil society research should watch whether Chile's current government translates rhetorical commitment to reversing Plan Laboral-era restrictions into further legislative change beyond the 2023 working-hours reform, particularly on sectoral bargaining rights that the original 1979 framework was designed to foreclose. Researchers, for their part, gain from this piece a dated empirical anchor—more than 50 years since the coup of September 11, 1973—against which future studies of Chilean and comparative Latin American labor movements can be measured, making this Latin American Perspectives article a useful benchmark for tracking whether institutional legacies of authoritarian rule continue to erode or persist in the decade ahead.

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