Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-08-17
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The question of how authoritarian legacies shape labor institutions long after dictatorships have formally ended is among the most consequential challenges in comparative political economy. Chile offers perhaps the most studied and debated case in the Latin American context, precisely because the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet did not merely suppress labor organizing as a temporary wartime measure but fundamentally restructured the architecture of work, wages, and collective action in ways that outlasted the regime itself by decades. As the world marked the fiftieth anniversary of the September 11, 1973 coup d'état in 2023, a renewed scholarly and public debate emerged over whether Chilean trade unionism is trapped by the institutional cage constructed during the Pinochet years or whether emergent social and political forces are generating conditions for a meaningful revitalization. The article published in Latin American Perspectives engages this question directly and at precisely the right historical moment, situating the trajectory of Chilean labor within the longue durée of authoritarian institutional engineering and its aftermath.
The Plan Laboral of 1979, designed by Labor Minister José Piñera under the supervision of the military government and its Chicago School economic advisors, constitutes the central institutional intervention that the article examines. The Plan did not simply restrict unions — it redesigned the entire framework of Chilean industrial relations at its foundations. By confining legally recognized collective bargaining to the level of the individual firm, prohibiting multi-employer or sector-wide negotiations, imposing severe procedural constraints on the right to strike, and fragmenting union membership into thousands of atomized enterprise-level organizations, the legislation produced a labor movement structurally incapable of the kind of class-wide solidarity that had characterized Chilean unionism prior to 1973. The Central Única de Trabajadores, which had been one of the most powerful and politically significant labor federations in Latin American history, was dissolved by decree. What replaced it was not merely a weakened version of the old model but an entirely different institutional logic — one in which the collective power of labor was legally disaggregated and subordinated to the logic of market competition between firms. The brilliance and the brutality of the Plan Laboral lay precisely in this: it was not brute repression alone that weakened Chilean labor, but the construction of a new legal-institutional order that made sustained collective action structurally improbable.
What makes the Chilean case particularly important for the study of authoritarian legacies in development and political economy is that the institutional framework of the Plan Laboral survived the democratic transition of 1990 essentially intact. The Concertación governments that governed Chile for the better part of two decades after Pinochet negotiated their way into power through a carefully managed transition that implicitly or explicitly accepted the inherited economic model as non-negotiable. The labor movement itself was in no position to demand otherwise, having been decimated by years of repression, exile, and institutional fragmentation. The result was a democratic polity that operated within the neoliberal economic architecture the dictatorship had built, generating what several scholars have described as a kind of "frozen" or "locked-in" labor relations system. Union density remained chronically low by any comparative regional or global standard. The capacity for sector-wide bargaining remained legally curtailed. The leverage that workers could exercise in any individual firm negotiation was undermined by the ever-present threat of firm closure, outsourcing, or subcontracting — all of which the flexible labor market framework explicitly encouraged. The transition to democracy restored political rights without restoring the institutional preconditions for robust labor power.
The article's attention to what it calls an "emerging revitalization" reflects a more recent and complex set of developments that demand serious analytical attention. The social uprising (estallido social) of October 2019, which began as a protest against a modest increase in Santiago metro fares and rapidly expanded into a broad popular mobilization against inequality, the pension system, health costs, and the accumulated frustrations of the neoliberal model, provided unmistakable evidence that the Chilean social contract was under profound stress. The constitutional convention process that followed, and the election of Gabriel Boric in 2021 on a platform explicitly critical of the inherited economic framework, opened a political window that the labor movement — along with feminist, indigenous rights, and student organizations — sought to use. Boric's government has proposed reforms to Chile's fragmented collective bargaining system, including measures aimed at enabling multi-employer bargaining in some sectors, strengthening union protections against anti-union dismissals, and addressing the chronic problem of subcontracting as a mechanism to circumvent collective agreements. Whether these reforms will translate into a durable institutional transformation of Chilean labor relations, or whether they will be diluted through the legislative process and blocked by employer and right-wing opposition, remains an open empirical question — but the direction of political contestation has shifted in ways that would have been difficult to anticipate even a decade ago.
For scholars of ODA and international development, the Chilean case carries implications that extend well beyond the specifics of South American labor history. The international development community spent much of the 1980s and 1990s presenting Chile's neoliberal experiment as a model — pointing to its macroeconomic stability, its export growth, and its sustained GDP increases as evidence that the Washington Consensus framework could deliver development. What this narrative systematically obscured was the degree to which that growth was built upon a repression of labor rights that left the bottom two quintiles of Chilean income distribution in conditions of chronic precarity, and upon an institutional architecture that made redistribution through collective bargaining legally and structurally very difficult to achieve. The now-extensive literature on "varieties of capitalism," "institutional complementarities," and "path dependence" provides useful conceptual tools for understanding why even well-intentioned democratic governments find it so difficult to dislodge inherited institutional orders, but the Chilean case pushes those frameworks to engage more directly with the question of how authoritarian power creates institutional facts that constrain future democratic choice. For development practitioners and researchers working in contexts where authoritarian or semi-authoritarian governments are currently restructuring labor markets, social protection systems, or civil society regulation, the Chilean lesson is sobering: institutions built under repression can prove extraordinarily durable, and their costs are often not fully visible until decades after the regime that created them has passed from the scene.
Looking forward, the scholarly and policy significance of research on the Chilean labor movement in its fiftieth post-coup year lies not only in understanding the past but in illuminating what conditions make institutional transformation possible after decades of authoritarian-imposed path dependence. The revitalization the article points to is real but fragile. It depends on an unusual alignment of social mobilization, political leadership, and legislative opportunity that may not persist. The defeat of the first constitutional draft in September 2022 demonstrated that even a highly mobilized civil society could not easily translate its energy into lasting constitutional change in a polarized political environment. The subsequent rightward shift in Chilean politics and the rise of figures associated with denial of Pinochet-era human rights violations as political forces remind observers that authoritarian legacies are not merely institutional but also cultural and political — they persist in the form of social coalitions that have benefited from and continue to defend the structures the dictatorship created. For researchers in civil society and political economy, understanding the conditions under which these coalitions can be challenged, and under which labor institutions can be genuinely reformed rather than merely tinkered with at the margins, remains one of the central intellectual and practical challenges of the field. The Chilean case, at this fifty-year juncture, offers an unparalleled opportunity to study these dynamics in a context where the historical stakes are clear, the empirical record is rich, and the outcome remains genuinely undecided.