[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: 2026-09-29

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

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More than half a century after the September 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende's Unidad Popular government, Chile continues to serve as a bellwether for how authoritarian institutional legacies shape the organizational capacity of labor movements long after formal democratization. A forthcoming article in Latin American Perspectives, titled "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 (pages 67-87, July 2026), takes up this question directly. Its timing—published in the year marking the anniversary of the Pinochet dictatorship's consolidation—underscores why the topic retains urgency: Chile is frequently cited in comparative political economy as the paradigmatic case of neoliberal restructuring imposed under military rule, and the durability of its labor-relations framework offers a test case for whether authoritarian-era institutions can be meaningfully reformed within a democratic order that has now persisted for over three decades.

The article's central analytical move is to trace how the politico-economic and institutional changes imposed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who governed Chile from 1973 to 1990, continue to structure the possibilities and limits of contemporary trade unionism. Central to this analysis is the Plan Laboral de 1979, the 1979 Labor Plan, which restructured collective bargaining and union representation in ways designed explicitly to fragment worker organization and curtail the political influence unions had wielded under the Allende government. By anchoring its argument in this specific legal-institutional instrument rather than in a generalized account of dictatorship-era repression, the article situates itself within a body of scholarship that treats labor law as a durable technology of political control—one that can outlive the regime that created it because it becomes embedded in subsequent constitutional and statutory arrangements rather than being fully dismantled by democratic successor governments.

This focus on institutional persistence connects to broader regional patterns documented across Latin American Perspectives and cognate journals, where scholars have repeatedly found that the transition to democracy in countries governed by military regimes did not automatically entail the reversal of labor-market liberalization enacted under authoritarian rule. Chile's post-1990 governments, beginning with the Concertación coalition, inherited and largely preserved the Plan Laboral's core architecture even as they pursued political liberalization on other fronts, a pattern that parallels debates in Argentina, Brazil, and other Southern Cone cases regarding the asymmetry between political democratization and socioeconomic democratization. The article's framing—positioning "authoritarian legacies" against an "emerging revitalization" of the union movement—suggests it engages with this literature not simply to catalogue continuity but to identify the specific conditions under which Chilean unions have begun to reassert bargaining power and political voice more than fifty years after the coup, a question with direct relevance to how civil society organizations more broadly navigate institutional environments shaped by prior authoritarian rule.

For researchers and policymakers concerned with ODA-adjacent governance and civil-society-strengthening programming, the article's implicit argument carries clear stakes: legal and institutional reforms enacted by international donors or domestic reformers to expand civic and labor freedoms cannot be evaluated solely by their formal enactment but must be assessed against the structural residue of prior authoritarian design. In Chile's case, the persistence of a labor code originally engineered to suppress collective action means that any assessment of "union revitalization" must account for whether observed gains reflect genuine institutional change or tactical adaptation within a still-constraining framework. This distinction matters for development practitioners and political economists alike, since programs aimed at strengthening trade unions or civil society organizations in post-authoritarian contexts risk overstating progress if they measure activity levels—strikes, membership drives, bargaining rounds—without accounting for the underlying legal architecture that determines how much such activity can actually achieve.

Looking forward, the article's more-than-50-years framing invites comparative extension to other countries where coup-era institutions have proven more durable than the regimes that created them, and it offers a methodological template for researchers examining civil society revitalization elsewhere: identify the specific authoritarian-era legal instrument, such as the Plan Laboral de 1979, trace its survival through subsequent democratic administrations, and then assess contemporary mobilization against that inherited baseline rather than against an abstract democratic ideal. For practitioners at institutions like IOCSS tracking global patterns in civil society and political economy, the Chilean case published in Latin American Perspectives serves as a reminder that anniversaries of authoritarian ruptures—here, the 1973 coup against Allende—are not merely commemorative occasions but analytically productive moments for reassessing whether formal democratic transition has actually delivered institutional transformation. As Chile's labor movement continues to navigate the space between the Pinochet-era legal inheritance and renewed organizational energy, this scholarship suggests that future research and policy attention should focus less on episodic indicators of union activity and more on the slower, harder question of whether the foundational rules governing labor relations have themselves been rewritten.

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