UC Berkeley

In 1990 Chile transitioned from a military regime led by General Augusto Pinochet to a democratically elected government led by the Coalition of Parties for Democracy, the Concertación, that had successfully opposed his continuation in power. Yet, the dictatorship left many legacies that persisted long after this transition. One crucial heritage was a set of major labor law transformations legislated in 1979 that Pinochet and its author, Labor Minister José Piñera, called the Labor Plan. The Labor Code the Pinochet government bequeathed to its successors was very unfavorable for the labor movement, especially in comparison to the pre-authoritarian legal regime. It was stridently opposed by the labor movement and the incoming Concertación promised “profound changes”, particularly in areas regulating unions, collective bargaining and strikes.

There were good reasons to believe the prospects for such changes were quite favorable. The labor movement had been a key leader in the opposition movement that led to democratic transition. The movement, and in particular the largest and most important labor organization, the CUT (Central Unitaria de Trabajadores - Unified Workers Central), enjoyed a close relationship of alliance with the Concertación. Indeed, the CUT and the Concertación were both led by leaders from the same two central political parties: the Christian Democratic Party and the Socialist Party. The transition also meant that the institutions of Chile became more open to participation and popular input, and the labor movement was no longer subject to the brutal repression of the dictatorship. Political opportunity theory predicts such an institutional opening should benefit a social movement.

Nonetheless, after 20 years of Concertación governments (1990-2010), the Labor Code was left substantially unchanged from that structured by the Labor Plan. Although institutional features of the 1980 Constitution and electoral laws left by the dictatorship as well as unyielding opposition by conservatives played a role in this outcome, this dissertation argues it was the very relationships between the labor movement and the newly ruling political parties and post-transition state that in the end explains this result. A politically incorporated labor movement was unwilling to exert the necessary pressure on allied political actors to dislodge the path of persistence of the Labor Code. So, what is often viewed as an opportunity turned out to obscure a risk of movement containment.