[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: 2026-10-01

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

Writing instructions ("작성해" 계열) require loading a matching skill first per CLAUDE.md. None of the listed skills (ODA proposal/report writers, PPT design, meeting-report, or call-record skills) fit this task — it's a scholarly analytical article about an academic journal piece for an ODA/civil-society research institute, not an ODA proposal, presentation, meeting report, or call transcript. No matching skill exists, so I'm proceeding directly.

More than fifty years after General Augusto Pinochet's armed forces overthrew the government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, the question of what remains of Chile's once-powerful labor movement continues to carry weight far beyond national borders. 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," scheduled for Volume 53, Issue 4 (July 2026, pp. 67-87), returns to this anniversary to ask how deeply the institutional architecture built under military rule still constrains organized labor today. The timing is not incidental: across Latin America and beyond, debates over shrinking civic space, weakened union density, and the durability of authoritarian-era legal codes have become central to how scholars and development institutions assess the health of civil society. For an observatory such as IOCSS, which tracks the interplay between political regime change and civil society vitality, Chile offers an unusually long and well-documented case study of how dictatorship-era rules can outlive the dictatorship itself.

The article's central analytical move is to trace the mechanisms by which the Pinochet regime (1973-1990) redesigned Chile's labor relations system, with particular attention to the Plan Laboral de 1979, the 1979 Labor Plan drafted under the regime's neoliberal economic team. That plan fragmented collective bargaining down to the enterprise level, imposed strict limits on the right to strike, and discouraged industry-wide or sectoral unionism—design choices intended to permanently weaken the union confederations that had underpinned the Popular Unity coalition. According to the study's framing, these were not merely emergency wartime measures but deliberate, durable institutional interventions meant to survive a future return to civilian rule, and the article's core contribution lies in documenting how successive democratic governments after 1990 left much of this architecture largely intact even as they dismantled other authoritarian legacies. This argument situates the piece within a broader scholarly tradition concerned with "authoritarian institutional legacies"—the idea that a dictatorship's most consequential achievement may not be repression itself but the legal and institutional scaffolding it leaves behind for democratic successors to inherit, often unintentionally reproduce, and only slowly unwind.

Read alongside broader regional trends, the Chilean case illuminates a pattern visible across Latin America's post-transition political economies: the persistence of labor-market institutions inherited from authoritarian or structural-adjustment periods, even as electoral democracy returns. Chile's trajectory is distinctive, however, because of the sheer duration of institutional continuity—more than three decades of civilian government operating substantially within the Plan Laboral's parameters—and because of the country's subsequent political upheavals, including the 2019 social uprising and the contested 2022 constitutional referendum, both of which put labor rights and union power squarely back on the national agenda. The article's reference to an "emerging revitalization" suggests its authors see these more recent episodes of mass mobilization as generating renewed union activity and bargaining leverage, even if the underlying legal framework established by the dictatorship has not been fully replaced. This framing resonates with comparative work on Argentina, Brazil, and other Southern Cone states, where researchers have similarly asked whether post-authoritarian labor revitalization can outpace institutional inertia, and it reinforces a recurring finding in Latin American Perspectives scholarship: that formal democratization and substantive labor empowerment do not automatically move in tandem.

For policy audiences and research institutions engaged with Chile and comparable middle-income democracies, the implications extend well beyond academic debate over the 1970s and 1980s. Governments, multilateral lenders, and civil-society funders assessing labor-market reform in Chile—including any future revision or repeal of Plan Laboral provisions—need a clear account of which specific institutional features (enterprise-level bargaining, strike restrictions, weak sectoral coordination) continue to shape outcomes, since reform proposals that fail to address these specific legacies risk reproducing the same fragmentation under a different legal label. The article's institutional focus also matters for how international development and labor-rights organizations calibrate technical assistance or advocacy around Chile: a labor code inherited from an authoritarian regime is a different policy object than one shaped purely by contemporary partisan negotiation, and treating the two as equivalent risks misdiagnosing why reform efforts stall. For researchers, the piece models a useful methodological approach for civil-society studies more broadly—anchoring claims about "authoritarian legacy" not in generalized rhetoric about dictatorship's long shadow, but in the granular tracing of one named policy instrument, the Plan Laboral de 1979, through more than fifty years of subsequent legal and political history.

Looking ahead, the fiftieth-plus anniversary of the 1973 coup arrives at a moment when Chile's political system is still negotiating the aftershocks of the 2019-2022 constitutional cycle, and when questions about union revitalization are unlikely to be settled by a single legislative session. Practitioners working on labor rights, civil-society strengthening, or ODA-adjacent governance programming in Chile and similar contexts would do well to treat institutional design—not just electoral competition—as a primary object of analysis, since, as this Latin American Perspectives article suggests, the rules written during authoritarian interludes can quietly outlast the regimes that wrote them. For researchers, the piece signals a productive direction: continuing to track whether Chile's post-2019 mobilizational energy translates into durable amendments to the Plan Laboral framework, or whether—as has happened before—revitalization remains confined to episodic mobilization without reshaping the underlying legal order that has governed Chilean labor relations since 1979.

Read the original article →