[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: 2026-10-03

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

해당 작성 요청(칠레 노동운동 관련 학술 기사 분석)에 맞는 스킬은 없습니다 — ODA 제안서/보고서, 발표자료, 회의 보고서, 통화·회의 기록 인용 중 어느 것에도 해당하지 않아 스킬 없이 바로 작성합니다.

More than five decades after the September 11, 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, Chile remains a touchstone for understanding how authoritarian regimes reshape labor institutions in ways that long outlast the dictatorships themselves. A 2026 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," published in Volume 53, Issue 4 (pages 67-87, July 2026), examines precisely this durability of institutional constraint. The timing of the piece is significant: it arrives amid a broader Latin American reckoning with the social costs of neoliberal restructuring, visible in Chile's own 2019 estallido social and the subsequent, ultimately unsuccessful, constitutional rewriting process. For an institute like IOCSS focused on civil society and political economy, the article offers a case study in how labor repression engineered under military rule can calcify into "normal" legal architecture that democratic governments subsequently inherit, normalize, and struggle to dismantle.

At the analytical core of the article is the Plan Laboral de 1979, the 1979 Labor Plan imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship, which the authors treat as the foundational mechanism through which Chilean unionism was politically and economically disarticulated. Rather than simply banning unions outright, the Plan Laboral restructured collective bargaining at the level of the individual enterprise, fragmented union representation, and constrained strike rights in ways designed to atomize worker solidarity while preserving a formal veneer of labor pluralism. The article's central argument appears to be that this is not merely historical background but an active institutional legacy: the legal scaffolding erected in 1979 continued to structure labor relations well into the democratic period that began in 1990, shaping union density, bargaining coverage, and strike frequency decades after the dictatorship's formal end. This framing positions Chilean unionism's weakness not as a cultural or economic inevitability but as the traceable product of specific, nameable policy choices made under authoritarian rule.

This argument resonates with wider patterns documented across the region's political economy literature, where post-authoritarian and post-conflict states frequently retain the regulatory infrastructure of the regimes that preceded democratization, even as formal political competition returns. Chile is often cited as the paradigmatic case of neoliberal state transformation under dictatorship, given how thoroughly the Pinochet-era reforms in pensions, education, and labor markets were insulated from subsequent electoral reversal through constitutional and statutory lock-in mechanisms. The article's focus on trade unionism extends this well-established narrative about Chilean neoliberalism into the specific domain of labor organizing capacity, suggesting that civil society revitalization in Chile cannot be understood solely through the lens of social movements or electoral politics but must also account for the granular, often technical persistence of labor law. This matters for comparative ODA and governance scholarship because donor and multilateral engagement with "civil society strengthening" in post-authoritarian contexts frequently underestimates how embedded legal architecture can neutralize formally restored associational freedoms.

The policy implications are substantial for both domestic Chilean reformers and international observers of labor and development policy. If the Plan Laboral's institutional residue continues to constrain union capacity even five decades after the coup, then democratic consolidation indices and civil society assessments that measure formal rights of association risk overstating actual worker power, since the practical mechanics of bargaining fragmentation and enterprise-level unionism were never fully reversed by Chile's post-1990 governments, including the Concertación and later center-left coalitions that governed for much of the subsequent three decades. This has direct relevance for institutions evaluating labor rights conditionality in trade agreements or development financing, since formal ratification of International Labour Organization conventions does not necessarily translate into functional bargaining power when the underlying statutory architecture still channels unionism toward fragmentation. Researchers studying civil society revitalization elsewhere—whether in post-dictatorship Southern Cone states or in other contexts where authoritarian legal legacies persist—should treat the Chilean case as a caution against conflating regime change with institutional change.

Looking forward, the article's framing of an "emerging revitalization" alongside persistent authoritarian legacies suggests that Chilean trade unionism in the mid-2020s is neither simply moribund nor simply recovering, but exists in genuine tension between inherited constraint and renewed mobilization—a tension that likely draws energy from the same social forces that produced the 2019 estallido social and the subsequent constitutional debates. For practitioners engaged in labor rights advocacy, development cooperation, or civil society support programming in Chile and comparable contexts, the lesson is that durable union revitalization will require addressing the specific statutory legacies of the Plan Laboral rather than assuming that the passage of time since 1990, or even since 1973, is itself sufficient for institutional renewal. For researchers, the fifty-year anniversary framing invites further comparative work asking whether other Latin American labor movements facing authoritarian pasts—in Argentina, Brazil, or Uruguay—exhibit similar patterns of legally encoded fragmentation, and whether genuine revitalization requires formal labor law reform or can instead emerge through informal organizing strategies that route around an unreformed legal order.

Read the original article →