Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-08-05
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The fiftieth anniversary of Augusto Pinochet's September 1973 coup against Salvador Allende's government arrived at a moment of profound global significance. Around the world, democracies are grappling with the resurgence of authoritarian tendencies, the hollowing out of labor protections, and the erosion of civil society organizations that once served as counterweights to concentrated economic and political power. Against this backdrop, the scholarly effort to reassess what happened to Chilean organized labor under the dictatorship — and to trace the long arc of its institutional decay and tentative revitalization — is not merely an exercise in historical accounting. It is an inquiry into how authoritarian ruptures reshape the structural landscape for civil society in ways that outlast the regimes responsible for them, and how subordinated social actors reckon with legacies that were by design intended to be permanent.
The article under examination in Latin American Perspectives directs its analytical attention to the particular institutional mechanisms through which the Pinochet regime sought to permanently reconfigure Chilean labor relations. The centerpiece of that effort was the Plan Laboral de 1979, a sweeping restructuring of collective bargaining and union law drafted under the influence of the so-called Chicago Boys — a cohort of economists trained in the neoliberal doctrines of Milton Friedman and his colleagues at the University of Chicago. The 1979 Labor Plan was not simply a set of technical regulations; it was an ideological project designed to atomize workers, fragment solidarity, and subordinate union activity to the logic of market competition. By restricting collective bargaining to the firm level, prohibiting solidarity strikes, limiting union membership thresholds, and introducing multiple union structures within a single enterprise, the Plan Laboral fragmented what had been one of Latin America's most politically significant and organizationally robust labor movements. The authors of the reform were candid about their purposes: they wished to produce a labor market in which individual workers negotiated with individual employers, rendering collective organization structurally peripheral rather than legally prohibited. This distinction matters enormously. Outright prohibition can be reversed by subsequent legislation; structural marginalization is far more resilient to political change because it is embedded in the incentive structures that workers and employers navigate daily.
What gives the article its analytical depth is its engagement with how these institutional legacies persisted long after the return of democracy in 1990. The Concertación governments that governed Chile through the 1990s and 2000s — center-left coalitions composed largely of parties that had been suppressed or underground during the dictatorship — made only incremental modifications to the Pinochet-era labor framework. The reasons were multiple: international pressures associated with export competitiveness, the constraints imposed by the 1980 constitution which itself encoded neoliberal principles, the fragmented and weakened state of union organizations that limited labor's political leverage, and the dominant ideological assumption, shared across much of the center-left during that era, that macroeconomic stability and market openness were prerequisites for any redistributive politics. The result was what scholars have described as path dependency with progressive coloration — a situation in which the broad outlines of the authoritarian labor order were reproduced and managed rather than dismantled. Union density in Chile remained chronically low by comparative standards, collective bargaining coverage stayed confined and enterprise-bound, and strike activity, while technically legal, was constrained by rules that made sympathy strikes and solidarity actions difficult to sustain in practice.
This trajectory connects to a broader pattern visible across Latin America and, increasingly, in other world regions where authoritarian interludes or sustained neoliberal reforms have reordered labor relations. In countries as different as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, scholars have documented how institutional frameworks created under duress or technocratic imposition tend to generate their own constituencies, habit structures, and path-dependencies that resist reversal even when the political will for reform nominally exists. The Chilean case is particularly instructive precisely because the Pinochet regime was so systematic and self-conscious in its institutional engineering. Comparative labor studies have shown that the degree of institutional coherence in an authoritarian labor order — that is, the extent to which regulations, incentives, and organizational structures reinforce one another — is a strong predictor of how durable that order proves under democratic successors. Chile scored high on this dimension, which is why the persistence of Plan Laboral structures decades into the democratic period is explicable not as political failure but as the predictable consequence of well-designed institutional lock-in.
The significance of the article's attention to revitalization is equally important and, arguably, more politically urgent. The period from roughly 2006 onward — marked by the Penguin Revolution of secondary school students, the emergence of powerful feminist mobilizations, and above all the social uprising of October 2019 known as the estallido social — suggests that Chilean civil society accumulated grievances and organizational energies that eventually erupted beyond the containment capacity of established institutional channels. Whether and to what extent labor organizations have been part of, or been reinvigorated by, these waves of mobilization is a crucial empirical question. The constituent process that followed the 2019 uprising, which produced a proposed new constitution (ultimately rejected in the September 2022 plebiscite), placed labor rights, collective bargaining, and the rights of workers prominently in its text — an outcome inconceivable under the Pinochet-era legal framework and indicative of how mobilization pressures can translate, at least partially, into constitutional imagination even when they fall short of definitive institutional change. The failure of that constitutional project and the subsequent swing toward the conservative government of Gabriel Boric's political opponents in the 2023 constitutional referendum cycle illustrates with painful precision the contested and nonlinear character of institutional transformation in post-authoritarian democracies.
For practitioners in the fields of development cooperation and civil society support, and for researchers whose work touches on democratic consolidation, the Chilean labor case carries implications that extend well beyond national context. It suggests, first, that assessments of democratic quality must go beyond electoral competition and formal rights to examine whether inherited institutional structures permit meaningful exercise of collective organization. A democracy in which workers are formally free to organize but face institutional frameworks calibrated to minimize the effectiveness of that organization is a truncated democracy in a meaningful sense. It suggests, second, that ODA and civil society support programming oriented toward labor rights and social protection must grapple seriously with the structural, not merely legal, dimensions of labor vulnerability. Technical assistance that helps unions navigate existing legal frameworks is valuable, but insufficient when the frameworks themselves are the problem. Third, and perhaps most broadly, the fifty-year retrospective that animates this article is a reminder that coups and authoritarian episodes are not simply political events that can be undone by transitions; they are institutional interventions whose consequences accumulate over time and require sustained, deliberate, politically costly efforts to reverse. As the global moment increasingly features democratic recession, rising inequality, and attacks on organized labor in contexts ranging from Eastern Europe to South Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa, the Chilean experience — both its sobering account of durable authoritarian legacies and its cautious narrative of emerging revitalization — offers a research tradition and a body of comparative insight that scholars and practitioners would do well to engage with renewed seriousness.