[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: 2026-10-12

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

다음 작성 지시와 관련해, 이 요청은 "학술 논문 기반 분석 기사" 작성이며 ODA 제안서·보고서, 발표자료, 회의·미팅 보고서, 통화·회의 기록 인용 중 어느 범주에도 해당하지 않습니다. 해당하는 스킬이 없음을 먼저 밝히고, 바로 작성을 진행합니다.

More than five decades after the military coup of September 11, 1973, the question of how authoritarian institutional legacies continue to shape contemporary political and economic life remains strikingly relevant across Latin America and, more broadly, in debates over democratization, labor rights, and civil society resilience. A forthcoming article in Latin American Perspectives, titled "Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d'État," scheduled for publication in Volume 53, Issue 4 (July 2026, pages 67–87), takes up this question directly by examining how the Chilean labor movement has been structurally constrained—and is now showing signs of renewal—within institutional frameworks first imposed under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The timing of the piece, arriving in the half-century anniversary window of the coup, underscores a broader scholarly and public reckoning in Chile and the region with how deeply authoritarian-era institutions can embed themselves in ostensibly democratic successor states, long after the formal transition to elected government.

At the center of the article's analysis is the Plan Laboral de 1979 (the 1979 Labor Plan), the signature piece of labor legislation enacted under Pinochet that restructured Chile's system of industrial relations along explicitly decentralizing and anti-collective lines. The article frames this policy as the key institutional mechanism through which the dictatorship sought to permanently weaken organized labor's capacity for sectoral or national-level bargaining, favoring enterprise-level negotiation, restricting the right to strike, and fragmenting union representation. By tracing the plan's effects from its 1979 origins through the dictatorship period of 1973–1990 and into the post-transition decades, the article situates Chilean trade unionism not as a story of simple decline followed by recovery, but as one shaped by a durable institutional architecture that has persistently constrained collective action even as the political regime around it changed.

This focus on institutional path dependency connects directly to wider patterns observed across Latin America's political economy, where Chile is frequently treated as the paradigmatic case of neoliberal restructuring imposed through authoritarian rule and then substantially preserved by subsequent democratic governments. The article's framing—authoritarian legacies alongside "emerging revitalization"—implicitly engages with a regional literature on how post-dictatorship states in the Southern Cone and elsewhere have struggled to dismantle labor and institutional codes inherited from military rule, even decades into democratic consolidation. For researchers and practitioners working on civil society and ODA-adjacent questions of labor rights, union pluralism, and social dialogue, Chile's experience under the Plan Laboral offers a concrete case study of how formal democratization does not automatically translate into the reversal of authoritarian-era economic institutions, a theme with clear resonance for other countries that experienced coups, prolonged military rule, or externally promoted structural adjustment during the same period.

The policy implications of this analysis extend beyond Chile's borders. Where multilateral and bilateral development actors engage with labor market reform, freedom of association, or collective bargaining capacity as components of governance and social-protection programming, the Chilean case—as reconstructed in this Latin American Perspectives article—illustrates the specific legal and institutional levers (enterprise-level bargaining restrictions, limits on strike rights, fragmentation of union structures) that can be targeted for reform, or conversely left unaddressed, with long-term consequences for civil society organizing capacity. The article's framing of "more than 50 years since the coup d'état" as the measuring point also signals a methodological contribution: it treats institutional legacy not as a feature that fades with time but as one whose persistence itself requires explanation, inviting researchers to examine which specific provisions of the Plan Laboral have survived successive governments and reform efforts since 1990, and why.

Looking forward, the article's attention to an "emerging revitalization" of Chilean trade unionism suggests that practitioners and scholars should watch closely how far recent organizing gains can go in altering institutional structures that have remained substantially intact since 1979. For researchers of political economy and civil society in Chile and across Latin America, the fifty-year anniversary of the coup is prompting renewed empirical attention to the gap between formal democratic restoration and the deeper institutional continuities that outlast authoritarian regimes—continuities that this article, through its detailed treatment of the Plan Laboral and the post-Pinochet trajectory of Chilean unions, helps to document with precision. Whether the revitalization identified in the piece proves durable will depend on whether Chilean labor organizations and policymakers can translate renewed mobilization into actual revision of the institutional rules first written under military rule, a question that remains open and empirically contestable as of this writing.

Read the original article →