[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: 2026-10-14

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

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More than five decades after General Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état of September 11, 1973, Chile remains a critical case study for understanding how authoritarian regimes reshape labor institutions in ways that persist long after democratic transition. This question has gained renewed salience in 2026, as countries across the Global South grapple with the long tail effects of structural adjustment and labor market deregulation imposed during periods of military or authoritarian rule. The article under review, "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, pp. 67-87, July 2026), offers a timely intervention into debates about whether union movements shaped under dictatorship can meaningfully revitalize within institutional frameworks originally designed to constrain them. For researchers at institutes like IOCSS tracking civil society trajectories in post-authoritarian contexts, Chile's experience functions as a bellwether case, since its labor code has served as a template referenced in other Latin American and even Asian policy discussions on labor flexibilization.

At the analytical core of the article is the Plan Laboral de 1979 (1979 Labor Plan), the labor code engineered by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) to restructure the legal and institutional foundations of Chilean unionism. The article argues that the Plan Laboral did not simply suppress unions through repression but durably reengineered the rules of collective action—decentralizing bargaining to the enterprise level, limiting the scope of strikes, and fragmenting union representation in ways that outlasted the transition to democracy in 1990. This is a crucial distinction: rather than treating authoritarian labor control as a temporary emergency measure, the article treats the 1979 reform as an institutional architecture whose logic continued to constrain Chilean unions through subsequent democratic administrations. By framing the analysis around "authoritarian legacies," the piece positions itself within a broader scholarly tradition that examines how dictatorships leave behind institutional residues—legal codes, property regimes, constitutional provisions—that democratic governments often find politically or economically difficult to dismantle, even when the original justification for those institutions has disappeared.

The second major thread of the article—the "emerging revitalization"—situates Chile within broader regional and global trends in labor politics. Across Latin America, the early twenty-first century saw a wave of labor movement renewal connected to commodity booms, leftist electoral victories, and renewed social mobilization, exemplified by Chile's own 2019 estallido social (social uprising) and the subsequent constitutional reform process. The article's attention to revitalization more than fifty years after the coup suggests that Chilean unions have found new avenues for mobilization despite the institutional constraints of the Plan Laboral, whether through sectoral alliances, informal coordination, or renewed political engagement with the state. This pattern resonates with comparative literature on civil society resurgence in post-authoritarian settings more broadly, where formal institutional change proves slow even as social actors find workarounds through protest, coalition-building, or international solidarity networks. For IOCSS's broader research agenda on civil society and global political economy, this suggests that institutional legacies and associational revitalization are not mutually exclusive processes but can coexist in tension over long time horizons.

The policy implications of this analysis extend well beyond Chile's borders. Development agencies and ODA programs that support labor rights, decent work, and democratic governance in post-conflict or post-authoritarian states must reckon with the finding that formal democratization does not automatically reverse authoritarian-era labor codes. If the Plan Laboral's decentralized bargaining structure and restricted strike provisions persisted for over three decades after Pinochet left office, this implies that technical assistance or capacity-building programs aimed at strengthening union representation in other contexts—whether in post-dictatorship Latin America, post-conflict states, or countries undergoing gradual political liberalization—cannot treat regime change alone as sufficient for institutional reform. This has direct relevance for international labor standards work conducted through bodies such as the International Labour Organization, which has long scrutinized Chile's labor code in the context of core conventions on freedom of association and collective bargaining. Researchers assessing ODA-funded governance and rule-of-law programming should similarly treat labor institutions as a distinct category requiring sustained, targeted reform rather than assuming that broader democratic consolidation will organically produce union revitalization.

Looking forward, the fifty-plus-year anniversary framing of this Latin American Perspectives article invites both scholars and practitioners to treat 2026 as a moment for stock-taking on the durability of authoritarian economic institutions more broadly. For researchers, the Chilean case offers a methodologically rich opportunity to trace institutional path dependency across multiple democratic administrations, since the Plan Laboral's survival through governments spanning the political spectrum—from the Concertación coalitions to more recent administrations—provides substantial longitudinal data for comparative labor studies. For practitioners working on civil society strengthening and labor rights promotion, the article's emphasis on revitalization "at more than 50 years since the coup" suggests that windows for institutional reform may open unpredictably, often tied to broader moments of social mobilization such as Chile's 2019 uprising, rather than through steady incremental policy change. As IOCSS continues to monitor how authoritarian legacies shape contemporary civil society and labor politics across regions, this Chilean case—anchored in the specific legal architecture of the 1979 Labor Plan and the political history of the Pinochet dictatorship—offers a concrete empirical foundation for comparative work on institutional transformation long after formal transitions to democracy.

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