Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-07-30
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The question of how authoritarian rule reshapes labor institutions — and how those institutions subsequently evolve, resist, or adapt over generations — sits at the intersection of political economy, civil society studies, and comparative democratization research. Nowhere is this question more sharply posed than in Chile, where the military coup of September 11, 1973 did not merely displace a government but inaugurated a systematic restructuring of the country's economic and social architecture. More than fifty years after General Augusto Pinochet's seizure of power, the Chilean trade union movement continues to bear the imprint of that transformation, even as new organizational energies and political conditions open the possibility of genuine revitalization. The article under review in Latin American Perspectives provides a rigorous accounting of this long arc, tracing the mechanisms through which authoritarian-era labor legislation constrained union power and examining the contested terrain on which workers and their organizations now seek to recover lost ground.
To understand the contemporary predicament of Chilean labor, one must begin with the Plan Laboral of 1979, the legislative centerpiece of the Pinochet government's redesign of industrial relations. Crafted under the influence of the Chicago School economists who served as the intellectual architects of Chilean neoliberalism, the Plan Laboral accomplished several mutually reinforcing objectives. It effectively confined collective bargaining to the level of the individual enterprise, prohibiting industry-wide or sectoral agreements of the kind that had historically allowed Chilean workers to build solidarity across workplaces and to exercise meaningful bargaining leverage. It restricted the right to strike by imposing mandatory replacement worker provisions and limiting the duration of legally protected work stoppages. And it atomized union structures by permitting multiple competing unions within a single workplace, thereby encouraging fragmentation rather than consolidation. These were not incidental features of the law but deliberate design choices intended to permanently weaken organized labor as a social and political force. The consequence was a trade union movement that entered the democratic transition of 1990 structurally debilitated, carrying institutional wounds that no change of government, by itself, could quickly heal.
The return of democratic governance under the Concertación coalition raised expectations among labor organizers and left-leaning scholars that the authoritarian labor code would be reformed in ways that restored meaningful collective rights. Those expectations were substantially disappointed. The democratic governments that succeeded Pinochet operated within a constitutional framework — itself a product of the dictatorship's 1980 constitution — that placed significant constraints on redistributive policy and maintained the essential architecture of the neoliberal economic model. While some modifications to the Labor Code were enacted over the following decades, the foundational logic of firm-level bargaining and restricted strike rights was preserved well into the twenty-first century. This represents a broader pattern observable across Latin America, where transitions from authoritarian rule often involved negotiated settlements that protected key institutional inheritances of the preceding regime, particularly those embedded in economic governance. The Chilean case is perhaps the most studied example of this dynamic, precisely because the Pinochet-era economic model was so thorough and because its survival through democratization was so complete.
The article's attention to emerging revitalization gestures toward what has changed, and the broader Latin American context helps illuminate why. The social uprising (estallido social) of October 2019, which drew millions of Chileans into the streets in protest against inequality, poor public services, and the accumulated grievances of three decades of managed democracy, reordered the political landscape in ways that created new possibilities for organized labor. The election of Gabriel Boric to the presidency in 2021, on a platform explicitly committed to advancing workers' rights, pension system reform, and a new constitutional settlement, represented a significant political opening. The subsequent — though ultimately unsuccessful — constitutional referendum processes reflected the depth of societal demand for structural change even as they also revealed the resilience of conservative institutional resistance. For trade unions, this environment has generated both renewed public legitimacy and fresh organizational challenges, including the need to speak to a precarious, informalized, and increasingly platform-mediated workforce whose experience of work differs substantially from the industrial labor relations model around which historic unionism was built. The broader regional trend, visible in Argentina, Colombia, and Brazil as well, involves labor movements navigating the simultaneous pressures of political opportunity and economic transformation, seeking to represent workers whose employment arrangements frequently fall outside formal collective bargaining frameworks.
The policy and research implications of this kind of longitudinal institutional analysis are substantial. For practitioners engaged in labor rights, civil society strengthening, or ODA programming in contexts of democratic consolidation, the Chilean case underscores a crucial point: the reversal of authoritarian institutional legacies is rarely accomplished through political transition alone. It requires sustained legislative effort, organizational capacity-building within civil society, and — critically — the construction of coalitional politics broad enough to overcome the veto power that incumbent economic interests typically retain even under democratic governance. Development agencies and international organizations working in post-authoritarian or transitional contexts should take seriously the temporal dimension of institutional reform: the effects of deliberately engineered fragmentation in labor law, as in other civil society domains, compound over time and cannot be unwound simply by restoring electoral competition. The scholarship on Chile also speaks to wider questions about the relationship between labor rights and democratic quality, suggesting that polities in which workers are structurally prevented from exercising meaningful collective voice will tend toward the kinds of inequality and social tension that ultimately destabilize the democratic project itself.
Looking forward, the trajectory of Chilean labor will serve as an important test case for scholars of comparative political economy and development practitioners alike. The question is not merely whether trade unions can recover membership and bargaining power in a formal sense, but whether organized labor can reconstitute itself as a genuine force for civil society pluralism in an era of profound economic restructuring. The challenges are considerable: informalización, platform capitalism, demographic change, and the continued ideological appeal of market individualism all work against rapid revitalization. Yet the social mobilizations of recent years, the political energies released by the estallido, and the persistence of labor activists across more than five decades of adversity suggest that the obituaries for Chilean labor are premature. For researchers, the analytical priority should be to track not only the formal indicators of union density and collective agreement coverage, but the subtler processes through which labor organizations build political alliances, develop new representational forms, and engage with the informal and platform economies that define work for growing segments of the population. The fifty-year reckoning with the coup's institutional legacy is, in this sense, also a fifty-year argument about the conditions under which democratic civil society can sustain itself against concentrated economic and political power — an argument whose resolution remains genuinely open.