Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-08-19
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
More than five decades after Augusto Pinochet's coup of September 11, 1973 fundamentally restructured Chilean political life, the country's labor movement continues to grapple with institutional constraints that were deliberately engineered to fragment worker solidarity and subordinate collective bargaining to market logic. The significance of this historical reckoning extends well beyond Chile's borders. Across Latin America and indeed the broader Global South, questions about how authoritarian institutional legacies persist long after formal democratic transitions have become central to debates in development studies, civil society research, and comparative political economy. As international donors and multilateral institutions invest in strengthening labor rights frameworks and civil society capacity in the region, understanding the mechanisms through which autocratic labor policies embed themselves into democratic governance structures is not merely an academic exercise — it is a prerequisite for effective policy design.
The article published in Latin American Perspectives situates its analysis around a specific inflection point: the Pinochet regime's Plan Laboral of 1979, an orchestrated legal overhaul of Chilean labor relations overseen by economist José Piñera and implemented as part of the broader Chicago School-inspired economic transformation. The Plan Laboral was not simply a set of restrictive rules — it was an architecturally coherent project of institutional demobilization. By decentralizing collective bargaining to the firm level, prohibiting solidarity strikes, circumscribing union membership rights, and reducing the role of federations and confederations to advisory rather than bargaining entities, the regime effectively atomized the Chilean labor movement. The structural consequence was a fragmentation that outlasted the dictatorship itself. When Chile transitioned to democracy in 1990, the incoming Concertación coalition inherited a labor code that had been deliberately designed to impede the very forms of collective action that trade unions depend upon for institutional leverage. Successive reform efforts — in 1991, 2001, and most significantly in 2016 with the Reforma Laboral under President Michelle Bachelet — have gradually softened some provisions, but they have not dismantled the fundamental architecture of enterprise-level bargaining that defines the Plan Laboral's enduring imprint.
The analytical contribution of this work rests on its ability to trace continuity and rupture simultaneously. On the continuity side, Chilean union density has remained persistently low by regional and OECD standards, hovering around ten to fifteen percent of the formal workforce for much of the post-transition period. Multi-employer bargaining — the instrument through which unions in countries like Argentina or Brazil have historically achieved wage coordination across sectors — remains legally circumscribed in Chile, limiting union leverage even in sectors where affiliation rates are relatively high. On the side of rupture and revitalization, the article's framing points toward recent dynamics that complicate any straightforward narrative of labor movement decline. The social uprising of October 2019, the constituent assembly process of 2021-2022, and the election of Gabriel Boric — himself a figure who emerged from student and social movement activism — have reopened political space for labor reform in ways that were largely foreclosed during the Concertación years. The emergence of new organizing strategies, particularly among precarious and platform workers, and the growing coordination between traditional unions and social movements around pension reform, housing rights, and environmental justice, suggests that Chilean labor is in a period of genuine, if uncertain, renewal.
From a development and civil society studies perspective, the Chilean case offers important lessons for understanding how institutional path dependency shapes the possibilities of collective action. Scholars working in the tradition of historical institutionalism have long argued that critical junctures — moments of rupture such as coups, economic crises, or constitutional transformations — set in motion self-reinforcing sequences that constrain future actors even when the original political conditions have changed. Chile illustrates this dynamic with unusual clarity because the Pinochet regime was so explicit about its intent to restructure civil society permanently. The neoliberal project was not merely economic; it was, as sociologist Tomás Moulian argued, a project of "civilizational transformation" aimed at producing atomized market subjects rather than collective political agents. For researchers and practitioners working on labor rights promotion, governance reform, or civil society strengthening in post-authoritarian contexts, this suggests that programmatic interventions focused narrowly on legal reform without attending to the cultural, organizational, and material residues of prior authoritarian institutions are likely to achieve limited and fragile results. ODA frameworks that support labor inspectorates, union capacity building, or worker centers need to account for the ways in which prior institutional arrangements have structured organizational capacity and strategic repertoires.
Looking forward, the Chilean case invites researchers and policymakers to think carefully about what genuine revitalization looks like in contexts of deeply embedded institutional constraint. The failure of the 2022 constitutional proposal — which contained significant labor rights provisions — is a reminder that formal institutional change is neither linear nor guaranteed, and that popular mobilization does not automatically translate into durable legal transformation. Yet the longer-term trajectory of Chilean labor also suggests that authoritarian legacies, however durable, are not immutable. The slow accumulation of organizational capacity, the forging of new coalitions between unions and social movements, and the gradual erosion of the ideological consensus around market fundamentalism that sustained the Plan Laboral's legitimacy for three decades are all dynamics that point toward a contested but genuine process of democratic deepening. For IOCSS and the broader community of scholars and practitioners engaged with ODA, civil society development, and political economy in the Global South, the Chilean trade union movement offers a rich and consequential case study in the long temporalities of democratic change — and in the limits of expecting rapid institutional transformation where authoritarian foundations were laid with particular depth and deliberateness.