[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: 2026-10-09

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

맞는 스킬을 먼저 확인했습니다. 보유 스킬 목록은 ODA 제안서/보고서(oda-master-writer, oda-word-writer, oda-hwpx-writer, kofih-consulting-proposal), 발표자료(oda-ppt-design), 회의·미팅 보고서(plaud-meeting-report), 통화·회의 기록 인용(call-meeting-records)으로 한정되어 있고, 이번 요청은 학술지 논문을 바탕으로 한 분석 칼럼 작성이라 해당 범주와 맞지 않습니다. 맞는 스킬이 없으므로 그대로 작성을 진행합니다.

More than five decades after General Augusto Pinochet seized power on September 11, 1973, Chile remains a central reference point for scholars examining how authoritarian rule reshapes the institutions of labor and civil society long after formal democratic transitions occur. 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, pages 67-87), returns to this question at a moment when Chile's political system continues to grapple with the unresolved institutional residue of the 1973-1990 dictatorship. The timing is significant: the article appears more than half a century after the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende's Unidad Popular government, and it arrives amid a broader regional reckoning in Latin America over how authoritarian-era economic architectures continue to constrain labor rights even within consolidated electoral democracies. For an institute like IOCSS, which tracks the interplay between political regime change and civil society capacity, the Chilean case offers one of the clearest long-run natural experiments in how coercive labor restructuring during dictatorship produces institutional path dependencies that outlast the regime itself.

The article's central empirical anchor is the Plan Laboral de 1979, the 1979 Labor Plan imposed by the Pinochet government, which the authors treat as the foundational mechanism through which authoritarian rule permanently altered the architecture of Chilean trade unionism. Rather than simply banning unions outright, the Plan Laboral restructured collective bargaining at the enterprise level, fragmented union representation, and imposed legal constraints on strike activity and sectoral organizing—design features explicitly intended to prevent the reemergence of the class-based, nationally coordinated labor movement that had underpinned Allende's coalition. The article's framing around "authoritarian legacies" signals an analytical approach common in the political economy literature on Chile: that the 1979 reform was not a temporary wartime measure but a durable institutional settlement, one that survived the 1990 return to civilian rule largely intact because post-transition governments, operating under the political constraints negotiated with the outgoing military regime, chose not to dismantle it. This positions the Plan Laboral alongside Chile's 1980 Constitution as one of the two pillars of the dictatorship's institutional afterlife—a framing that connects the labor-specific argument to the wider literature on Chile's "protected democracy."

Yet the article's subtitle also points to an "emerging revitalization," suggesting the authors identify countervailing dynamics that complicate a purely declensionist narrative of permanent union weakness. This dual framing situates the piece within a broader regional pattern visible across Latin America, where labor movements that were institutionally hollowed out under military or authoritarian-adjacent rule—in Argentina, Brazil, and parts of Central America—have shown episodic capacity for renewal during periods of political opening, particularly when linked to broader cycles of social mobilization. In Chile specifically, this revitalization thesis resonates with the explosion of the 2019 estallido social, the mass protest movement that forced a constitutional rewriting process, and with the subsequent election of Gabriel Boric in 2021 as a president explicitly committed to reversing elements of the Pinochet-era economic model. The article's more than 50-year retrospective vantage allows it to assess whether union revitalization in this period represents a durable institutional shift or a conjunctural response to a specific protest cycle—an empirical question with direct relevance to how researchers should interpret labor organizing gains achieved outside of formal legal reform.

The policy implications of this analysis extend well beyond Chile's borders. Because the Plan Laboral de 1979 has long served as a template cited by international financial institutions and market-oriented reformers as a model of "flexible" labor regulation, any scholarly reassessment of its long-term effects on union capacity carries weight for debates over labor-market design in other middle-income economies undergoing structural adjustment. For researchers and practitioners in the ODA and development policy space, the Chilean trajectory is instructive precisely because it demonstrates that formal democratization—Chile has held competitive elections since 1990—does not automatically restore the collective-bargaining power or civil-society density that authoritarian rule dismantled. This has direct bearing on how institutions such as the ILO, and bilateral donors supporting labor governance reform in post-authoritarian or post-conflict states, calibrate expectations about the pace and sequencing of union revitalization relative to electoral transition. The Boric government's 2023 enactment of a 40-hour workweek law and its broader push for pension and tax reform can be read, in light of this article's framework, as contemporary political attempts to unwind specific components of the Plan Laboral's legacy, making the academic debate over whether such efforts constitute genuine "revitalization" or marginal adjustment a matter of immediate policy relevance rather than purely historical interest.

Looking forward, the article's framing invites researchers to treat the Chilean labor movement as an ongoing case study in institutional durability and change, one where the 50-year marker since the 1973 coup functions less as closure than as an invitation to reassess what authoritarian legacies persist and which have genuinely eroded. For practitioners working on civil society strengthening or labor governance programming in Latin America, the lesson embedded in this analysis is that legal frameworks inherited from authoritarian periods—like the Plan Laboral—can continue to structure bargaining power asymmetries for decades after the transition to electoral rule, meaning that technical assistance or policy dialogue focused narrowly on electoral or constitutional reform risks overlooking the labor-code-level mechanisms that most directly determine whether civil society organizing capacity actually recovers. As Chile's own constitutional process—twice rejected at the ballot box, in 2022 and 2023—illustrates the difficulty of formally rewriting the dictatorship's institutional inheritance, the trade union arena examined in this Latin American Perspectives article may prove a more tractable, incremental site of reform than wholesale constitutional change, making it a case worth continued close observation by both comparative labor scholars and development practitioners alike.

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