[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: 2026-10-10
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
No existing skill in my available set covers this kind of task — writing an analytical research-institute article synthesizing an academic journal abstract on Chilean labor history/political economy. The ODA-proposal, PPT, meeting-report, and call-record skills in my CLAUDE.md instructions don't apply here, so per that instruction I'm stating this and proceeding directly.
Fifty-three years after the September 1973 coup that installed Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship, Chile remains a case study in how authoritarian institutional engineering can outlast the regime that designed it. This is the premise of 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, pages 67–87, in the journal's July 2026 issue. The timing is not incidental: Chile has spent much of the past decade renegotiating the institutional settlement left by the dictatorship, from the 2019 estallido social to two failed constitutional rewrites, and labor organization sits near the center of that contested legacy. For an institute like IOCSS tracking how civil society actors reconstitute themselves after prolonged authoritarian rule, the Chilean union movement offers a rare long-duration dataset: more than five decades separating the imposition of authoritarian labor institutions from the present attempt to dismantle them.
The article's analytical core is the Plan Laboral de 1979, the 1979 Labor Plan devised under Pinochet (who ruled from 1973 to 1990) specifically to neutralize organized labor as a political force. Rather than banning unions outright, the plan restructured the legal architecture of labor relations—fragmenting bargaining units, restricting the scope of collective negotiation to the enterprise level, and limiting the right to strike—so that unions would be structurally weak even after democratic rule returned. The article's framing suggests its central argument is that this is not merely historical background but an active institutional constraint: the politico-economic architecture imposed under dictatorship continued to shape union density, bargaining power, and organizational fragmentation well into the democratic period, producing what the title calls "authoritarian legacies" that persist independently of regime type. This is a significant corrective to narratives that treat Chile's 1990 transition to democracy as a clean institutional break; the labor plan's logic, as the article's framing implies, survived the dictatorship that created it.
Set against broader Latin American and global trends, Chile's experience is illustrative of a pattern scholars of civil society and ODA-adjacent political economy have long flagged: authoritarian regimes across the region used labor-law engineering, not just repression, to produce durable asymmetries of power that outlived formal democratization. The Chilean case is frequently treated as the regional exemplar of neoliberal labor restructuring precisely because the Plan Laboral predated and arguably modeled subsequent deregulatory reforms elsewhere in Latin America during the debt-crisis and structural-adjustment era of the 1980s. For organizations monitoring civil society space and associational freedom as components of development outcomes, the article's attention to "institutional" legacies—its own keyword framing alongside "authoritarian," "coup," and "Chile"—reinforces a broader lesson relevant well beyond Chile: formal democratic transition does not automatically restore the civil society infrastructure, including independent unions, that authoritarian rule dismantled. This matters for how international observers and donors assess "democratic consolidation," since union density and bargaining coverage are measurable, comparable indicators of associational life that can lag formal political liberalization by decades.
The policy implications engaged by this body of research are directly tied to Chile's current political moment. Gabriel Boric's government has pursued labor reforms—including a reduction of the standard workweek and attempts to expand sectoral or multi-enterprise bargaining—that are best understood as efforts to directly unwind specific mechanisms of the 1979 Labor Plan rather than generic "modernization." The article's reference to an "emerging revitalization" of the union movement suggests its empirical contribution lies in documenting whether and how these legal changes, combined with the political opening created by the 2019 protests and the subsequent constitutional debates, have actually translated into measurable gains in union membership, strike activity, or bargaining coverage—rather than assuming legal reform automatically produces organizational revival. For researchers, this distinction between formal labor-law change and actual associational revitalization is the crux of the article's likely contribution, and it offers a methodological template other scholars could apply to post-authoritarian labor movements in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, or Paraguay, where similar gaps between legal liberalization and organizational capacity have been documented.
Looking forward, both practitioners in civil society support and researchers of comparative political economy should treat the Chilean union case as an open-ended test of institutional path dependence rather than a settled story of either persistent authoritarian legacy or triumphant revitalization. The fact that Latin American Perspectives frames the fifty-year mark explicitly as a juncture "between" legacy and revitalization—rather than declaring one outcome—signals that the empirical picture as of 2026 is genuinely mixed, and that further monitoring of concrete indicators (union registration data, collective bargaining coverage rates, strike frequency under the post-2023 labor reforms) will be necessary to adjudicate the claim. For IOCSS's broader interest in how civil society actors recover associational capacity after authoritarian rupture, Chile's trajectory—shaped by a half-century-old legal architecture, a mass mobilization in 2019, and an unresolved constitutional process—remains one of the clearest live cases for testing whether democratic institutions alone are sufficient to reverse authoritarian institutional design, or whether deliberate counter-legislation, as attempted under the Boric government, is a necessary condition for genuine labor revitalization.