[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: 2026-10-06

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

해당 작성 지시에 맞는 전용 스킬(ODA 제안서·보고서, 발표자료, 회의 보고서, 통화 기록 인용)은 없어 바로 작성합니다.

More than five decades after the September 1973 coup that installed Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship, Chile remains a key case study for understanding how authoritarian institutional engineering can outlast the regimes that created it. 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), examines this dynamic through the lens of organized labor. The timing is significant: Chile has spent the past several years debating constitutional reform, pension system overhaul, and labor code modernization, all while grappling with the structural legacy of the dictatorship era. Understanding why Chilean unions remain comparatively weak—despite Chile's image as a regional economic success story—requires returning to the institutional architecture imposed between 1973 and 1990, which is precisely the task this article undertakes.

The article's central analytical thread runs through the Plan Laboral de 1979, the 1979 Labor Plan designed under the Pinochet dictatorship to restructure Chile's industrial relations system. According to the summary, this plan, along with the broader politico-economic transformations of the 1973-1990 period, fundamentally altered the conditions under which Chilean trade unionism could organize and bargain. Rather than treating union weakness as simply a function of post-1990 neoliberal policy choices, the article situates the problem in the deliberate institutional design of the dictatorship itself—a framework that decentralized collective bargaining to the firm level, restricted the right to strike, and fragmented union structures in ways that persisted well beyond the 1990 transition to democracy. This framing positions the article within a growing body of Latin American Perspectives scholarship that treats authoritarian-era institutions not as temporary aberrations but as durable constraints shaping post-transition political economy.

This case resonates with broader regional patterns in how military and authoritarian regimes across Latin America used labor law to pre-empt future mobilization by civil society and organized labor, from Argentina's dictatorship-era union controls to Brazil's corporatist labor codes under earlier authoritarian periods. What distinguishes the Chilean case, and what the article's subtitle signals through its reference to an "emerging revitalization," is the suggestion that more than 50 years after the coup, Chilean unions are showing signs of renewed organizational capacity. This connects to observable developments in Chilean civil society over the past decade, including the 2019 estallido social protests and subsequent constitutional convention processes, which brought labor and social movement demands back into mainstream political discourse after decades of institutional marginalization under the Plan Laboral framework. For researchers tracking ODA, civil society strengthening, and democratic consolidation in middle-income countries, Chile offers a instructive counterpoint to assumptions that formal democratization automatically dismantles authoritarian institutional legacies.

The policy implications extend beyond Chile's borders. International labor rights frameworks, including those promoted by the International Labour Organization, have long flagged Chile's restrictive strike provisions and decentralized bargaining structure as inconsistent with core labor standards, yet substantive reform has proceeded slowly even under successive democratic governments since 1990. This article's institutional focus—tracing outcomes directly to the 1979 Labor Plan rather than to more recent policy failures—carries implications for how development institutions and civil society organizations assess reform priorities in post-authoritarian contexts more broadly. If union weakness in Chile is rooted in structural design dating to the dictatorship, then technical assistance or capacity-building programs aimed at strengthening civil society organizations must contend with legal and institutional architecture, not merely organizational capacity or funding gaps. This has direct relevance for institutions like IOCSS that track civil society studies across regions grappling with authoritarian pasts, since it underscores that formal democratic transition and genuine associational revitalization can diverge for decades.

Looking forward, this article's framing of "emerging revitalization" invites practitioners and researchers to monitor whether recent Chilean union organizing translates into durable institutional change or remains episodic, tied to moments of acute political crisis such as the 2019 protests. Researchers working on Latin American political economy should watch whether Chile's post-Pinochet labor framework undergoes meaningful legislative reform in the coming years, and whether such reform, if it occurs, follows patterns seen elsewhere in the region or charts a distinct path shaped by Chile's particular dictatorship-era legal legacy. For civil society scholars and ODA practitioners alike, the Chilean trade union case, as analyzed through the lens of the 1973 coup and the 1979 Labor Plan, offers a long-duration natural experiment in how authoritarian institutional legacies can constrain, but not permanently foreclose, the revitalization of organized civil society even more than half a century after the originating rupture.

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