[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: 2026-10-05
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
No skill in the configured list matches this task (it's a standalone analytical article on an academic journal piece, not an ODA proposal/report, PPT, meeting report, or call-record citation), so I'm proceeding directly.
Fifty-three years after General Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup against Salvador Allende, the question of how authoritarian institutional legacies continue to shape labor politics in Chile remains strikingly relevant to scholars of democratization and civil society. A forthcoming article in Latin American Perspectives (Volume 53, Issue 4, pages 67-87, July 2026), titled "Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d'État," takes up this question directly, examining how the politico-economic and institutional architecture imposed under the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) continues to constrain Chilean trade unionism even as new currents of labor revitalization emerge. The timing of the piece, appearing in the year marking more than half a century since the coup, situates it within a broader wave of retrospective scholarship reassessing the durability of neoliberal institutional design in Latin America, a subject of acute interest to anyone tracking the relationship between authoritarian state formation and the long-run weakness of organized civil society.
At the core of the article's analysis is the 1979 Labor Plan (Plan Laboral de 1979), the signature labor-market reform engineered under the dictatorship, which the author identifies as the structural mechanism through which the regime fragmented and demobilized Chilean unions. The Labor Plan decentralized collective bargaining to the firm level, restricted the right to strike, and limited the scope of unions' legal prerogatives, producing an institutional template that, according to the article, has proven remarkably resistant to reform even after the formal return to democracy in 1990. This argument situates the piece within a well-established scholarly tradition that treats Pinochet-era labor law not as a transitional artifact but as a durable constitutional-economic settlement, one whose effects on union density and bargaining power persisted across successive post-transition governments. The article's framing of "authoritarian legacies" as an active, ongoing constraint rather than a historical footnote is significant because it pushes against narratives that treat Chile's democratic consolidation since 1990 as having fully superseded dictatorship-era institutions.
The article's attention to institutional continuity resonates with broader regional patterns in the political economy of labor and civil society across Latin America and the Global South more generally, where ODA-funded governance and labor-reform programs have frequently struggled against similarly entrenched legal architectures inherited from prior authoritarian or structural-adjustment periods. Chile is often held up internationally, including within OECD and World Bank policy circles, as a model of market-oriented development; this article's account of persistent union fragmentation under the Plan Laboral complicates that narrative by showing that institutional "modernization" can simultaneously function as a durable mechanism of labor demobilization. For researchers and practitioners working on civil society strengthening in middle-income countries, the Chilean case is instructive precisely because it demonstrates that formal democratization—competitive elections, a functioning judiciary, periodic constitutional reform efforts such as Chile's 2022 and subsequent constitutional processes—does not automatically translate into the restoration of associational power for subordinate social groups such as organized labor.
Beyond its historical-institutional argument, the article's identification of an "emerging revitalization" within the contemporary Chilean labor movement carries direct policy and research significance. If, as the title suggests, new forms of union organizing and mobilization are surfacing more than fifty years after the coup, this raises pointed questions for labor-policy reformers and donor agencies about which legal and institutional levers—collective bargaining coverage, strike rights, sectoral versus firm-level negotiation—would need to change to consolidate that revitalization rather than allow it to remain marginal within a Plan Laboral framework still substantially intact. For international development institutions and civil-society-support programs operating in Chile and comparable Latin American contexts, the article implies that interventions focused narrowly on formal democratic procedure, without attention to labor-code-level institutional reform, risk leaving the deeper authoritarian-era architecture of economic governance untouched. This has clear relevance for policy debates inside Chile itself, where successive governments, including that of Gabriel Boric, have faced pressure to reform labor legislation inherited from the dictatorship as part of broader efforts to address inequality and strengthen collective bargaining rights.
Looking forward, the article's dual framing—authoritarian legacy on one hand, emergent revitalization on the other—offers a productive agenda for researchers tracking the trajectory of Chilean civil society and, by extension, labor movements elsewhere that confront similarly entrenched post-authoritarian legal orders. Practitioners engaged in ODA-funded governance, labor-rights, or civil-society-strengthening programs in Latin America would do well to treat the Chilean experience under the Plan Laboral de 1979 as a cautionary benchmark: institutional legacies of authoritarian rule can outlast the regimes that created them by decades, shaping associational life long after formal transitions to democracy. For scholars, the more than fifty-year vantage point adopted by this Latin American Perspectives article suggests that future comparative work should examine whether the signs of union revitalization identified in Chile are replicable in other post-dictatorship labor regimes across the region, and whether sustained institutional reform—rather than democratic consolidation alone—is the necessary condition for genuine recovery of civil society's organizational capacity.