[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: 2026-10-11

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

이 작업에 맞는 스킬(ODA 제안서/보고서, 발표자료, 회의 보고서, 통화 기록 인용)이 없어 스킬 없이 바로 작성합니다.

The fiftieth anniversary of Chile's 1973 coup d'état has renewed international attention to a question that remains central to debates over democratization and labor rights across the Global South: what happens to organized labor when an authoritarian regime deliberately re-engineers the legal architecture of work. This question is far from academic nostalgia. As of mid-2026, Chile continues to operate under labor institutions whose foundations trace directly to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), even as the country has undergone successive waves of democratic reform, a failed 2022 constitutional referendum, and a second, more conservative constitutional process in 2023. The article "Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d'État," published in Latin American Perspectives (Volume 53, Issue 4, pages 67-87, July 2026), arrives precisely at this juncture, offering a long-range assessment of how durable the dictatorship's imprint on Chilean unionism has proven to be, and whether recent signs of labor mobilization amount to a genuine revitalization or merely episodic resistance within an unchanged structural cage.

At the core of the article's analysis is the Plan Laboral de 1979 (1979 Labor Plan), the signature piece of labor legislation drafted under Pinochet's civil-military government and credited to the economic team associated with José Piñera, then labor minister. The Plan Laboral was not an incidental policy but a deliberate instrument of political-economic engineering: it decentralized collective bargaining to the firm level, restricted the right to strike, permitted employers to hire replacement workers during strikes, and fragmented union representation by favoring enterprise-level unions over sectoral or confederal structures. The article's framing—examining both the "politico-economic and institutional changes" imposed by the dictatorship—situates the Plan Laboral not as a technical labor-market reform but as part of the broader neoliberal restructuring that Pinochet's regime pursued in tandem with the "Chicago Boys" economists, whose monetarist and deregulatory doctrines reshaped Chilean capitalism well beyond the labor sphere. By tracing union density, bargaining coverage, and strike activity across more than five decades, the piece treats 1979 as a foundational rupture whose institutional residue persisted through Chile's transition to democracy in 1990 and beyond, despite subsequent governments—including those led by the Concertación coalition and later by the Nueva Mayoría and current administrations—enacting partial labor reforms.

This institutional-legacy argument resonates with a wider pattern across Latin America and other regions that experienced authoritarian rule in the latter twentieth century, where constitutions, labor codes, and civil society regulatory frameworks drafted under dictatorship have proven remarkably resistant to post-transition reform. Argentina's labor relations law under military rule, Brazil's corporatist union structures inherited from the Estado Novo and reinforced during its own dictatorship, and South Korea's labor-control apparatus under Park Chung-hee all illustrate a comparable dynamic: authoritarian regimes frequently use labor law as a mechanism of social control that outlives the regime itself, because dismantling it requires not just political will but renegotiating the balance of power between capital, labor, and the state that the authoritarian period entrenched. The Chilean case is particularly instructive for ODA and development research audiences because it demonstrates that "institutional change" imposed through structural adjustment-style reforms can function as a durable constraint on civil society organization long after formal democratization—a lesson directly relevant to contemporary development finance institutions evaluating labor and governance conditionality in program lending to post-authoritarian or post-conflict states.

The policy implications extend into current debates about Chile's own reform trajectory and into the broader methodological conversation among civil society and labor researchers about measuring "revitalization." If the article's periodization through 2026 shows trade union membership and bargaining coverage still well below pre-1973 levels despite more than three decades of democratic governance, this suggests that formal democratic restoration is an insufficient condition for reversing authoritarian-era institutional legacies in the labor domain—a finding with direct relevance for how multilateral institutions and bilateral donors design technical assistance on labor governance, freedom of association, and decent-work indicators in middle-income countries transitioning from authoritarian rule. For researchers, the piece also models a useful analytical device: treating a single piece of legislation, the Plan Laboral de 1979, as a lens for tracing institutional path dependency across a fifty-year horizon, a method transferable to the study of other sector-specific legacies—land tenure, pension privatization, or municipal decentralization—that originated under the same Pinochet-era reform package and have proven similarly resistant to subsequent democratic revision.

Looking forward, practitioners monitoring civil society space in Latin America should treat the "emerging revitalization" identified in the article's title with calibrated attention rather than either dismissal or premature celebration: episodic strike waves or renewed confederal organizing in Chile do not by themselves confirm that the Plan Laboral's structural constraints have been overcome, but they do indicate pressure points worth tracking as Chile's political system continues to process the aftermath of its 2022 and 2023 constitutional processes. For scholars of ODA, civil society, and political economy, the fifty-year retrospective offered by this Latin American Perspectives article underscores a durable methodological point: evaluating the health of civil society organizations in post-authoritarian states requires distinguishing between the restoration of formal democratic rights and the reversal of the specific institutional architectures—labor codes, union registration rules, bargaining structures—that authoritarian regimes leave behind. As more countries confront their own authoritarian labor legacies, from Southeast Asia to parts of Eastern Europe, the Chilean trajectory traced in this article offers a cautionary benchmark for how long such legacies can persist, and how much deliberate institutional reconstruction, rather than democratic transition alone, is required to dislodge them.

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