Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-08-20
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, chile, coup, institutional
The fiftieth anniversary of the September 11, 1973 coup in Chile offers more than a commemorative occasion — it provides scholars and practitioners alike with a critical vantage point from which to assess how authoritarian ruptures reshape the institutional fabric of labor relations for generations. Chile's case is particularly instructive because the Pinochet regime did not merely suppress organized labor through coercion; it engineered a comprehensive restructuring of the political economy that embedded anti-union logics into the legal architecture of the state itself. As scholars continue to document the long shadows cast by authoritarian governance over democratic institutions across Latin America, this article in Latin American Perspectives arrives at a moment when questions about the reversibility of neoliberal labor regimes — and the capacity of civil society organizations to reclaim institutional space — carry fresh urgency in both academic and policy circles.
The article centers on the Plan Laboral of 1979, the legislative cornerstone of the Pinochet regime's labor market transformation, as the primary institutional mechanism through which the dictatorship's imprint on Chilean trade unionism was consolidated and perpetuated. Designed under the supervision of José Piñera, then Minister of Labor, the Plan Laboral deliberately fragmented collective bargaining by restricting it to the enterprise level, prohibited solidarity strikes and inter-union coordination, and created a dual-track system that systematically weakened the organizational power of unions by multiplying them at the firm level while eliminating their capacity for broader class-based mobilization. This was not simply an economic policy but a consciously political project: the regime understood that the destruction of organized labor's structural power was a necessary precondition for the consolidation of the neoliberal model, which in turn would constrain the policy choices of future democratic governments. The insight driving the article's analytical contribution is that these institutional legacies outlasted the dictatorship itself, surviving the 1990 transition to democracy largely intact because the negotiated character of the transition — structured around the framework of the 1980 constitution — foreclosed the possibility of a comprehensive labor reform agenda.
What emerges from this analysis is a picture of democratic consolidation that was simultaneously politically formal and economically constrained. Chilean democracy restored civil and political rights but inherited a labor relations system that structurally disadvantaged workers and their organizations. Union density declined dramatically from the pre-coup period, and the fragmentation of collective bargaining meant that even when unions were legally reconstituted, they operated within a framework designed to limit their social influence. The article's exploration of "revitalization" is thus particularly significant: it asks under what conditions, and through what mechanisms, labor movements can begin to reassert themselves within institutional arrangements explicitly designed to contain them. This question has resonance well beyond Chile. Across the Global South, authoritarian interludes have repeatedly been followed by formal democratization processes that nonetheless preserve the economic settlement brokered under repression, and labor movements in countries as diverse as Brazil, South Korea, and Indonesia have confronted analogous dilemmas about how to rebuild organizational capacity within hostile institutional environments.
The article's contribution must also be read in the context of broader shifts in Chilean political economy over the past decade. The social uprising of October 2019, sparked by a metro fare increase but sustained by deeper grievances over inequality, privatized pensions, healthcare costs, and the commodification of education, revealed the accumulated social costs of four decades of constrained labor rights. The subsequent constitutional process — however it ultimately concluded — demonstrated that Chilean civil society had not simply acquiesced to the institutional legacy of the dictatorship. Trade unions participated in that mobilization alongside student federations, feminist organizations, and indigenous communities, suggesting that the "revitalization" the article identifies is not merely a union-internal phenomenon but is embedded in a wider realignment of civil society actors. For researchers working on labor and ODA-related governance, this raises important questions about the relationship between labor rights frameworks and broader democratic development outcomes: can international development assistance and civil society support programs meaningfully address institutional path dependencies rooted in authoritarian constitutional design, or do they remain caught at the surface of symptom management?
Looking forward, the Chilean case presents both cautionary lessons and genuine grounds for analytical optimism. The persistence of authoritarian labor market institutions across democratic transitions underscores the importance of understanding legal and institutional change not as a technical exercise but as a deeply political one, conditioned by the balance of forces at the moment of transition and by the constitutional frameworks that structure subsequent contestation. At the same time, the emerging revitalization documented by this article suggests that path dependencies, however powerful, are not deterministic. Trade unions and allied civil society organizations retain the capacity to accumulate organizational power incrementally, to forge coalitions across sectors, and to translate social mobilization into institutional reform demands — even when the institutional terrain has been deliberately shaped against them. For practitioners in international labor rights, ODA programming, and democratic governance support, the Chilean experience over the past fifty years offers a sobering reminder that supporting the formal re-legalization of unions after authoritarian transitions is necessary but far from sufficient. What is required is sustained attention to the quality of the institutional framework governing collective labor rights, including the scope of collective bargaining, the right to solidarity action, and the degree to which constitutional design enables or forecloses structural reform. The questions this article raises — about institutional legacies, civil society resilience, and the contested terrain between authoritarianism and revitalization — are not merely of historical interest. They are pressing analytical and practical concerns for anyone engaged with the intersection of political economy, labor rights, and democratic consolidation in the contemporary world.