[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: 2026-10-13

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

해당 요청에 맞는 스킬(ODA 제안서/보고서, 발표자료, 회의·통화 기록 관련)이 없어 스킬 없이 바로 작성합니다.

Fifty-three years after General Augusto Pinochet's armed forces overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, the question of what remains of Chile's labor movement has gained renewed analytical urgency. A study appearing in Latin American Perspectives, Volume 53, Issue 4 (July 2026, pp. 67-87), titled "Between Authoritarian Legacies and the Emerging Revitalization: The Chilean Trade Union Movement at More Than 50 Years Since the Coup d'État," arrives at a moment when Chile itself has been engaged in a prolonged constitutional and social reckoning, following the 2019 estallido social and two failed constitutional rewrites. For an institute like IOCSS, which tracks how authoritarian ruptures reshape civil society across decades, this anniversary framing is significant: it asks not simply what the dictatorship destroyed, but what institutional residues from 1973-1990 continue to constrain or enable collective labor action in the present, and whether recent signs of union revitalization represent a durable break from that legacy or merely a cyclical fluctuation within it.

The article's central analytical device is the 1979 Labor Plan (Plan Laboral de 1979), the legal architecture imposed by the Pinochet regime to fundamentally restructure industrial relations in Chile. Rather than simply banning unions outright, the Plan Laboral decentralized collective bargaining to the firm level, restricted the right to strike, fragmented union representation, and embedded a model of labor flexibility that long outlasted the dictatorship's formal end in 1990. The article's framing of "authoritarian legacies" versus "emerging revitalization" is not a simple binary opposition but a periodization: it traces how successive democratic governments after 1990 left the core architecture of the Plan Laboral largely intact even as they introduced incremental reforms, producing a labor relations regime that scholars of Chile have long described as institutionally inherited rather than democratically re-founded. This matters because it locates the weakness of contemporary Chilean unionism not primarily in economic structure or globalization pressures alone, but in a specific, datable, named policy instrument whose authors designed it explicitly to atomize worker organization.

Positioned within broader Latin American and global political economy literature, this account fits a well-documented pattern in which military and authoritarian regimes used labor law, rather than only repression, as a tool of long-term social engineering. The Chilean case is frequently treated as the paradigmatic instance because the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) combined coercive violence against union leaders with a technocratic legal re-engineering of the workplace, producing effects that persisted through the Concertación and subsequent governments. Comparable dynamics have been documented elsewhere in the region, where authoritarian-era labor codes outlived the regimes that wrote them, but the Chilean case is distinctive for the explicitness with which the 1979 Labor Plan was designed as an instrument of economic liberalization alongside political demobilization. For researchers at institutions tracking civil society trajectories across the Global South, this reinforces a broader methodological point: measuring "democratization" purely through electoral indicators can obscure the persistence of authoritarian institutional residues in domains such as labor law, which shape the associational capacity of civil society long after formal transitions.

The policy implications extend well beyond Chile's borders and carry direct relevance for institutions engaged in development cooperation and civil society strengthening, including ODA-funded governance and labor-rights programming. If an institutional legacy as narrowly defined as a single labor code can suppress associational life for five decades, then donor and multilateral programs aimed at "civil society strengthening" or "social dialogue" in post-authoritarian or post-conflict settings need to look past surface-level freedom-of-association guarantees and examine the granular legal architecture governing collective bargaining, strike rights, and union fragmentation. The article's periodization—dictatorship (1973-1990), followed by decades of institutional continuity, followed only recently by signs of "revitalization"—suggests that labor-sector reform assistance calibrated to electoral transition timelines may be structurally too short; meaningful union reconstitution appears to require multi-decade horizons, a finding with direct bearing on how technical cooperation projects in labor governance set their own timeframes and success metrics.

The identification of an "emerging revitalization" is the article's most forward-looking contribution and the one most likely to shape future research agendas. Rather than treating Chilean unionism as permanently hollowed out by the Plan Laboral, the study situates recent organizing activity within the post-2019 social mobilization cycle that also produced Chile's constitutional convention process, suggesting that civil society energies unleashed by the estallido social have begun to flow into labor organizing specifically, not only into electoral or constitutional channels. This observation invites comparative research into whether other Latin American societies with similarly entrenched authoritarian-era labor codes are experiencing parallel revitalization dynamics, and whether such revitalization is contingent on broader cycles of social mobilization or can be sustained independently through targeted legal reform.

For practitioners and researchers engaged with Chile and comparable cases, the more than fifty-year arc traced by this study—from the September 1973 coup, through the codification of labor flexibility in the 1979 Labor Plan, to contemporary signs of renewed organizing—offers a cautionary benchmark against premature declarations of either permanent authoritarian path dependence or straightforward democratic recovery. Future scholarship building on this Latin American Perspectives article would do well to track specific legislative efforts to reform or repeal remaining elements of the Plan Laboral, to disaggregate "revitalization" by sector and firm size given the Plan's decentralizing logic, and to ask whether Chile's experience offers transferable lessons for other states whose associational life was similarly reshaped by legally codified, rather than purely coercive, authoritarian governance.

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