Writing about Workers, Reflecting on Dictatorship and Neoliberalism: Chilean Labor History and the Pinochet Dictatorship

Abstract

This article explores the trajectory of Chilean labor history and its recent efforts to study workers’ experiences under the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990). Influenced by the impact of dictatorship on Chilean society as well as global historiographical debates, Labor Studies became an interdisciplinary and transnational field in Chile. This article focuses on the different academic traditions that have intersected with and contributed to the study of workers’ experiences under the dictatorship. It considers the multiple origins of New Labor Studies and includes the social history of both rural and urban movements, labor sociology, feminist historiography, and transnational history. It also looks at the multiple debates taking place in Chile and in other parts of the world. Bringing them together offers the opportunity to see the intersections, collaborations, and influences that have made the study of Chilean workers a dynamic field.

On the cold morning of September 11, 1973, Chileans woke up to the imminent fall of democracy, while President Salvador Allende gave his last radio speech. Allende accused the military of breaking Chile's long constitutional tradition, and he praised working men and women, peasants, and the youth for their loyalty, commitment, and hard work during his short revolutionary presidency. The armed forces had the physical strength to overthrow his government, but, he reassured the country, “history is ours, and people make history.” During the dark years of dictatorship, Allende's final words reappeared on walls, in leaflets, and in songs, maintaining the hope that “sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk and build a better society.” Allende's speech also reminds us of the centrality of working people as historical and political actors and the importance of including workers to understand Chile's twentieth-century history.

The presence of workers in the country's public space inspired the development of labor studies in Chile. From the studies on working conditions published by social reformers at the beginning of the century to the birth of the new social history in the 1980s, the history of workers was at the heart of Chile's academic, economic, and political debates throughout the twentieth century.¹ The study of the working class intertwined with political and ideological struggles. In the 1950s, classic Marxist historians placed labor struggles at the center of the nation's history, a narrative that highlighted the evolution of the labor movement from the heroic strikes in the nitrate industry to the consolidation of labor parties.² By the time of the 1973 military coup, the study of working-class issues and the union movement had a solid place in the country's academic life and political imaginary. The dictatorship and transnational historiographical debates transformed Chilean academia. Beginning in the 1980s, Chilean labor and social historians looked beyond traditional institutions, union leadership, and the workplace. Some turned to social history to understand working people's everyday life, the process of working-class formation, political culture, larger social movements and demands, and female workers.

This historiographical essay explores the trajectory of Chilean labor history and its efforts to study the workers’ experiences during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990). The topic challenges us to bring together, in a single and coherent narrative, the debates taking place in Chile and those in other parts of the world. Despite dialog and collaboration, scholars have usually started from concrete political realities and academic traditions. They have engaged their topic of study and major theoretical paradigms differently. Their research agendas, Heidi Tinsman writes for the case of gender studies, reflect each region's unique “historical and political processes.”³ However, it is impossible to separate academic streams. The transnational careers of many academics and the dialog, collaborations, and influences across regions have made the study of Chilean workers a dynamic field.

Today, most historians agree that labor history is more than just the study of labor unions and confederations, collective bargaining, union leaders, and the workplace. It also includes the many cultural, political, social, and economic factors that have shaped working-class identity and experience. However, historiographical essays tend to identify a single origin, reconstructing a teleological path from traditional union studies to new labor history. It is time that we turned to the different academic traditions that have intersected with and contributed to the study of workers’ experiences such as the social history of rural and urban movements and the feminist historiography. This approach is especially relevant in the case of Chilean historiography since few Chilean historians call themselves labor historians. Instead, they have preferred the broader term of social historians.

The article is organized in five sections. The first section provides an overview of the shift in Chilean historiography in the seventies and eighties and its impact on labor history. Understanding this shift as well as the relationship between historiographical turns and political goals are key pieces of this story. “The military coup of 1973 changed the course of Chilean history as well as of its historiography,” Julio Pinto persuasively writes.⁴ Then, it turns to the three threads that have most influenced studies of workers under military rule: (1) Labor sociology; (2) Studies of working-class urban communities; and (3) feminist labor historiographies. As a mode of conclusion, the review explores recent historiographical contributions and offers an agenda for a new social history of working people under the Pinochet dictatorship.

The Experience of the Military Coup and the Transformation of Chilean Historiography

In September 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup that ended Chile's democratic socialist experiment. For the next seventeen years, Chile became a symbol of the militarization, violations of human rights, and the imposition of neoliberal reforms that would sweep the continent. Part of that story is the impact of the coup on universities, academics, and intellectual debates. Like other authoritarian leaders, the Chilean military considered scholars and artists a threat to national security, and it immediately targeted university communities and, with particular viciousness, social science departments. Many professors and university students experienced first-hand the repressive machine that was making the Pinochet regime infamous worldwide, and they were ousted without financial compensation.⁵ Yet, despite the military attempt to silence critical ideas, intellectual debates flourished underground, in exile and abroad, and in Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and independent research centers.⁶

Salvador Allende's socialist experiment had inspired a myriad of studies from around the world. It also attracted countless visitors, many of whom developed long-term relationships with Chile and Chileans and, after the military coup, contributed to solidarity movements.⁷ The numerous articles, editorial pages, and letters that appeared in the international press the days and months following the coup reflect the global impact of the events in Chile.⁸ As Ann Jones explains in her study of international union solidarity, the “coup in Chile shattered more than the broad front of Chilean radicals—it fueled a firestorm of arguments over left strategy around the world.”⁹ While it was neither the first nor the last coup in Latin America, the overthrow of a democratic socialist experiment had a symbolic impact and paved the way for larger, international solidarity involvement.¹⁰ But non-Chilean scholars approached the study of Chile from their political positions, intellectual traditions, and realities. Latin Americanists in the United States, heavily influenced by dependency theory way into the 1980s, focused on the degree of US intervention and its responsibility in the military coup. In contrast, Western European scholars studied the fall of Chilean democracy within the larger debate about Eurocommunism and the rise of a neoconservative movement.

Following the military coup, Chilean scholars in Chile and in exile reflected on the mistakes of the Left, the meanings of Salvador Allende's defeat, and the possibilities of resistance.¹¹ After 1975, Chilean historian Gabriel Salazar argues, intellectuals and political activists initiated a process of “reflection and search.”¹² This process was part political self-criticism, but also a theoretical examination on the viability of a democratic transition to socialism and, in the end, the entire socialist model. Scholars also questioned the possibilities of traditional Marxist approaches, both as an analytical and theoretical tool and a political project. From a larger perspective, this introspection paralleled and interacted with, Salazar explained, the “crisis of contemporary Marxism.”¹³

In the late 1970s, Pinochet's efforts to institutionalize the regime and replace Chile's constitution and laws became clearer. It was, many argued, a counterrevolution. Advised by the Chicago Boys, a group of economists influenced by Milton Friedman, the military government deregulated the national economy, privatized state companies and services, flexibilized the labor market, and eroded social protections such as social security and health care. These were the seven modernizations that made Chile the icon of neoliberalism around the globe. These reforms mirrored the publications of right-wing analysts. Economists such as Sergio de Castro and José Piñera provided the regime with the intellectual foundations for the changes that were taking place at the time.¹⁴ While Jaime Guzman, a lawyer, influenced the constitutional process, neoconservative historians such as Gonzalo Vial Correa supported the military efforts by erasing the contributions of social and labor movements from national history. In 1987, Joaquín Lavín celebrated the neoliberal modernization of the country in Chile: una revolución silenciosa [Chile, a Silent Revolution]. The following year, Eugenio Tironi revealed the enormous human cost of this authoritarian transformation in Chile: Los silencios de la revolución [Chile, the Silences of the Revolution]. More than ever history was a contested terrain.¹⁵

Influenced by national and international debates as well as the experience of exile, Chilean historians redefined social history.¹⁶ In the UK, a group of Chilean historians that included Leonardo León, Luis Ortega, and Gabriel Salazar founded Nueva Historia. Influenced by British new labor history, Nueva Historia incorporates working people's experiences and identities into social and economic historical narratives.¹⁷ Within this group, Salazar had the most influence on labor history. His book, Labradores, peones y proletarios [Farm Workers, Peons, and Proletarians] was published by the NGO SUR in 1985, and became, according to Julio Pinto, “a sort of paradigm of the new proposal.” Salazar examined the impact of the expansion of capitalism on working people and, what he calls, the crisis of a traditional popular society.¹⁸ While he focused on the nineteenth century, he has influenced a generation of Chilean historians to looking beyond a traditional Marxist definition of the working class and the union hall, employing the more fluid concept of popular classes (bajo pueblo).

In a more recent study, Salazar has defended the importance of this historiographical turn, although, for him, it is one that is still incomplete. Traditional historians, Salazar argues, “have privileged [the study of] political parties, the political class, foreign and imported ideology, the working class—those who are employed, have a job, a labor union, a political party, and are protected by social legislation.” Historians, Salazar continues, have ignored “the large mass of marginalized people, women, children, the youth, shantytown residents, and those who have problems with the judicial system.”¹⁹ Salazar's emphasis on the social experience has also led to some important debates within Chilean new social history. Sergio Grez, for example, has argued the need to pay more attention to politics, political movements, and the political ideas and proposals of working people.²⁰ Grez has brought attention to the shifting influence of Anarchism and Communism on working people during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the role of the Democratic Party in advancing labor legislation, and the early history of the social question.²¹

In tandem with the UK-based historians, historians in Chile, many of them working in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and independent academic centers such as ECO, FLACSO, and SUR, also became interested in social history.²² Despite limited resources, scholars explored new methodologies and approaches to social science including questions of gender and sexuality, oral history, community studies, and collective memory.²³ It was a hectic time. Many of these NGOs, Chilean historian Mario Garcés reflects, played two important roles: “to support popular organizations as well as social research directly.”²⁴ The intersections of academic and political goals produced exciting work in what James Green called “movements history.”²⁵

Building on a long tradition of popular education, historians Mario Garcés and Pedro Milos working at the NGO Educación y Comunicaciones/Education and Communication (ECO) during the 1980s, developed historical teaching materials and organized local workshops for grass-root organizations. For example, ECO produced a short book on the history of labor confederations in Chile to raise historical questions, inform the ongoing debate about the labor movement, and contribute, then, to its reunification. By making its work accessible to a wider audience, ECO empowered working people and provided them with a sense of their history, a history that an official and militarized narrative permanently denied.²⁶

The historiographical renovation that took place in Chile interacted with the transformation of Latin American history and studies in the North Atlantic world.²⁷ In 1976, Brian Loveman, a political scientist, published the first comprehensive study on rural unionization in Chile. He placed the struggle for land into a long historical framework from 1919 to 1973, demonstrating the enormous political power of landowners to limit the enforcement of the law and prevent the transformation of labor, social, and economic relations in the countryside.²⁸ In 1983, Peter DeShazo published his study on urban workers in early-twentieth-century Chile. DeShazo challenged traditional historical interpretations that had emphasized the centrality of nitrate miners and the Communist Party in the Chilean labor movement during the early twentieth century. Building on a bottom-up approach, he stressed the importance of urban and transportation workers and the influence of Anarcho-syndicalists. A few years later, in 1986, Peter Winn published Weavers of Revolution.²⁹ Influenced by factory studies and based on an impressive array of oral history, Winn used the microstudy of one factory, Textile Yarur, as a window into the larger history of working people in the twentieth-century. Like other factory workers, textile workers faced enormous difficulties in organizing and challenging the power of factory owners. By 1970, they celebrated the victory of Salvador Allende and carried on a revolution from below. Winn also became one of the first historians to extend labor history beyond the 1920s, well into the twentieth century, addressing decades rarely touched by Chilean historiography.³⁰

In 1990, only a few months after the return of democracy, the journal Proposiciones, published by SUR, dedicated an issue to social history and the study of the bajo pueblo. The special issue included articles by both Chilean and non-Chilean historians such as Peter Winn, Arnold Bauer, and Argentine scholar Luis Alberto Romero. The topics addressed reflected the broad range of issues and debates that characterized social history internationally at the time, from a study on abandoned children to an examination of the methods of control an discipline used in the mining industry. It was a showcase of recent historiographical turns and the commitment of scholars to questions of social justice an the re-democratization of society. Stated by Salazar in his introduction, the new social history was more than just another historiographical turn, but it had a special place in the struggle for democracy:

Today, historical revisionism is not another experiment made by a stubborn and premodern researcher. It is rather a social need. And a need that not only has to do with the poor and de-historicized mass of this country, but also with the possibility of establishing a sense of national unity that is more social and dynamic than the one imposed by conservative historiography….³¹

Since the 1990s, the history of Chilean working people has expanded and echoed new debates in academia. Julio Pinto, who received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1991, has become a leading figure in the re-examination of the nitrate industry, now from a class formation point of view, and the study of popular politics.³² While the nitrate and mining industry has continued to be the heart and soul of labor history in Chilean academia, in the last decade, historians have started exploring questions of food, child labor, the role of international labor organizations, and the impact of industrial paternalism.³³ In the United States , Elizabeth Q. Hutchinson, Thomas M. Klubock, Jody Pavilack, Joel Stillerman, and Heidi Tinsman have studied the intersections between labor history and gender, everyday politics, consumption, and the environment. Other historians have contributed to labor history by looking at sports, family relations, and the middle class.³⁴ French historian Franck Gaudichaud has studied workers’ experiences during the Popular Unity, with a particular focus on the industrial belts (cordones industriales), whose geographically defined organizations, provide a bottom-up perspective on the political and labor activism of the most “revolutionary” workers.³⁵ However, despite this rich academic production, now more diverse than ever, there is a still a sense that labor historians have made only a few timid attempts to explore the Pinochet Era.³⁶

From Labor Sociology to a History of the Labor Movement

Labor sociology has a long tradition in Chile. It dates back to the foundation of a center for the study of labor sociology at the University of Chile in 1956, the exchange with US industrial relation scholars such as James Morris in the 1960s, and the influential work and long-term collaboration with French sociologist Alain Touraine.³⁷ Unlike the traditional Marxist scholars that focused on nitrate miners, labor sociologists in the 1960s looked at the industrial world and the transformation of labor relations throughout the twentieth century.³⁸ The influence of Touraine is remarkable and spanned from the 1960s through the 1990s. Touraine visited Chile regularly throughout the 1960s, and many Chilean academics studied under his guidance at the École of Hautes Etudes des Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Francisco Zapata, a Chilean sociologist who studied with Touraine in the 1960s and has lived in Mexico since the military coup, explained that the French sociologist encouraged them to look at the influence of the work process on both workers’ political behaviors and the characteristics of the union movement.³⁹

In tandem with the study of industrial relations and in conjunction with the process of Agrarian Reform and rural unionizations, a group of sociologists, economists, and agricultural scientists turned to the countryside.⁴⁰ They mostly focused on the land tenure system, showing the political, economic, and social exploitation of peasants living and working on large properties (haciendas).⁴¹ While these studies advocated the radical transformation and modernization of the countryside, they, José Bengoa reflected, paid little attention to the characteristics of peasants as social and historical actors.⁴²

Under the Pinochet dictatorship, the repression of the labor movement, a new legal framework to regulate labor relations, and economic reforms transformed the union hall, the workplace, and the working-class community. Between 1979 and 1982, José Piñera, Minister of Labor, carried out a draconian Labor Plan. In broad terms, these laws considerably limited the right to strike, undermined job security, and eroded union power. Despite their anti-union character, the Labor Plan opened a small space for the reorganization of the labor movement and the election of new union leaders. These legal reforms were profound, and they became the backbone of a larger neoliberal agenda. Throughout the rest of the decade, manufacturing jobs shrank, agricultural jobs became almost exclusively seasonal, and the most dynamic sectors of the economy were service and agribusiness.⁴³

Would the labor movement be able to survive these economic and political changes and, more importantly, rearticulate after the return of democracy? Was the traditional dependent relationship between labor unions and political parties and the state still valid? What would happen to the peasant unions? Labor sociologists examined the impact of the Labor Plan, the economic recession of the early 1980s, and neoliberal restructuring on the labor movement.⁴⁴ They demonstrated that local unions had lost their political contacts, and that despite efforts to reorganize a national labor confederation, most unions were small, isolated, and dispersed. The Labor Plan had also reduced the role of the state, and, for the most part, workers were on their own facing powerful employers. In the countryside, conditions were more dismal. In complicity with land owners, the dictatorship had assassinated and disappeared peasant leaders and activists, imposing a state of terror. The reversal of the Agrarian Reform and rapid modernization transformed the labor market, accelerated rural-urban migration, and consolidated the power of large agribusiness.⁴⁵ Dictatorship and neoliberalism had completely transformed Chilean society.

As military coups took place throughout the Southern Cone and waves of expatriates encountered each other in exile, scholars examined the similarities across the region. In 1981, the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation in Amsterdam sponsored an international conference titled Trade Unionism and Authoritarian Regimes in Argentina and Chile.⁴⁶ In the following years, labor sociologists and political scientists would look at the Southern Cone countries as examples of the experience of workers and unions under authoritarian regimes.⁴⁷ J. Samuel Valenzuela debated the experience of workers under authoritarian regimes, and, a few years later, Paul Drake published an innovative analysis of organized labor under authoritarian regimes in the Southern Cone and Southern Europe.⁴⁸ However, there is no truly transnational history, and themes such as international labor solidarity and labor migration have only very recently attracted scholarly attention.⁴⁹ While labor sociologists initially explored the similarities of authoritarian regimes and labor movements, more research is needed to understand the impact of neoliberal reforms and economic restructuring across the region and the extent to which Chile became a model.

The plebiscite of 1988 created momentum for the study of labor and attracted massive international attention. In March 1989, a few months before the first democratic presidential election, a group of scholars met at the University of California, San Diego to “analyze the transition from authoritarianism in a long-term and comparative perspective.” They looked back at the 1980s and examined the erosion of military power and the crisis of dictatorship that led to Pinochet's defeat in the plebiscite. In 1991, the book, edited by Paul W. Drake and Iván Jaksić, included articles by influential Chilean authors like Manuel Antonio Garretón, Felipe Larraín, and Augusto Varas. In the chapter on the labor movement, British political scientist Alan Angell, author of a classic study on the relationship between the state and labor movement, analyzed the challenges faced by trade unions in the context of the transition to democracy.⁵⁰ Skeptical of their chances to recover their pre-dictatorship influence, Angell underlined the legal restructuring imposed by the Labor Plan, the changes in the labor market, and the historical marginalization of women workers from the trade union movement. He also recognized the existence of other social movements such as the one in the shantytowns and raised questions about the possible relationship between labor unions and these other organizations.

Most of these publications were essays that responded to the political challenges of the time, reflecting on the future possibilities of the trade union movement in a democratic Chile. Economists from CIEPLAN, a think tank created in 1976 to analyze economic reform and public policy in Latin America, also joined this conversation. Given the electoral contexts of 1988–1990, these reflections and spaces of discussion influenced public policy, and they became a way to think about the future of Chilean labor and economic policy. For example, René Cortázar, an economist from CIEPLAN and the first Minister of Labor after the return of democracy, published extensively about changes in the labor market, unemployment, and the national economy. In front of these changes, he believed that the pre-1973 model of labor relations was obsolete, and instead that a “modern” system could include flexible contracts and little room for the state and political parties to intervene.

In the 1980s, labor sociologists offered a broad view of the impact of dictatorship and neoliberalism on the Chilean labor movement and larger labor confederations.⁵¹ Since the return of democracy in 1990, labor sociologists have turned to the contradictions of democracy, the lack of labor reform, and the long-term impact of neoliberal reforms on Chilean workers and the union movement.⁵² Rural sociologists, on the other hand, had explored the feminization of labor and the overall deterioration of working conditions, demographic changes, and the coexistence of large agribusiness with clusters of rural poverty.⁵³ One of the most important recent turns in rural studies is the incorporation of the categories of race and ethnicity and gender, allowing scholars to provide a more complex view of the countryside. The recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the Mapuche people clearly reflects this trend.⁵⁴

Studies of Working-class Communities

Labor historians have long looked at communities and neighborhoods as spaces of working-class formation, socialization, and politicization.⁵⁵ This broader perspective has shed light on workers’ lives and experiences outside the traditional workspace such as leisure time, family relations, and popular culture.⁵⁶ This turn to the neighborhood also highlights the experience of working people who had no formal or permanent employment or were not members of the organized labor movement. In other words, studying the intersections between work and community spaces allow historians to explore the lives of what Gabriel Salazar has called “popular” classes. From this standpoint, one of the most prominent spaces to study working-class communities in dictatorial Chile has been the shantytowns, in Chile called poblaciones. During the years of the dictatorship, shantytowns were sites of repression and resistance. Devastated by the implacable neoliberal reforms and the dismantling of social rights and infrastructure amid the long and profound economic crisis of the 1980s, pobladores struggled to survive in a city that pushed them to the margins, both physically and socially. They were the other side of the so-called “economic miracle.” Despite police brutality and high levels of unemployment and poverty, the urban poor became the most symbolic image of the resistance against the dictatorship.

Influenced by the long tradition of urban studies in Chile and Latin America, the 1980s-urban crisis and new historiographical debates, a group of scholars turned to the urban poor and their resilient communities.⁵⁷ They studied the social and urban movements of the second half of the twentieth century, placing the struggles of the 1980s in a longer historical movement to access housing and democratize the city.⁵⁸ Profoundly interdisciplinary, urban scholars incorporated the methodologies that became emblematic of the new social history of the 1980s such as oral interviews and ethnographies. The work of Alain Touraine on social movements and actors also influenced urban studies.⁵⁹ In the mid-1980s, Vicente Espinoza recalled, scholars held many discussion sessions with pobladores. In these instances, pobladores reflected about their history and future and the methods of struggle.⁶⁰ Again, academic and political goals intertwined in most research projects conducted under the umbrella of NGOs in the 1980s.

With a long tradition in urban, social, and community studies, historian Mario Garcés is the leading urban and social scholar today in Chile. During the dictatorship, he worked as a historian and popular educator at the ECO and was the author of educational materials that emphasized a popular labor history and the workers’ own construction of their historical narrative. Later in the 1990s, he continued his research on the transformation of Santiago during the second half of the twentieth century. In 2002, Garcés published his doctoral dissertation, Tomando su sitio: El movimiento de pobladores de Santiago, 1957–1970.⁶¹ By focusing on urban social movements, he also questioned traditional political and historical approaches that have exclusively focused on organized labor, arguing for a more inclusive view of working people and their organizations. In collaboration with Sebastián Leiva, Garcés published El Golpe en la Legua. Based on oral interviews, the authors reconstructed the day of the military coup in La Legua, an emblematic working-class neighborhood in Santiago. In La Legua, industrial workers, neighbors, and political activists joined forces and resisted, for a few hours, the coup.⁶²

While scholars initially concentrated on the period preceding the military coup, a few have studied the Pinochet era. In Shantytown Protest in Pinochet's Chile, for example, Cathy L. Schneider looked at the long history of urban struggles and grassroots activism that characterized shantytowns before and during the dictatorship. For Schneider, the Communist Party and its clandestine culture deeply influenced social movements in Santiago shantytowns, while Philip Oxhorn sees the Catholic Church, not leftist political parties, as the inspiration and organizer.⁶³ Alison Bruey studied the history of two emblematic working-class poblaciones in Santiago, La Legua and Villa Francia, and came to the conclusion that it was both the “Communist culture” of the combative poblaciones and their progressive Catholic priests that together explain their activism. With the support of radical political parties and the Catholic Church, the residents La Legua and Villa Francia were at the forefront of the protests of the 1980s.⁶⁴ Building on a long tradition of resistance, the urban poor organized, resisted, and confronted repression, economic crisis, and neoliberalism. Edward Murphy focused on how, throughout the twentieth century, working people have struggled to find a home in Santiago as part of a larger demand for citizenship and economic inclusion. Housing rights, urban scholars argue, have historically been at the center of the country's political debate, motivating not only the land seizures that became emblematic during the 1960s but also the struggle for democracy in the 1980s.⁶⁵

Urban studies have contributed to a better understanding of the lived experience of the majority of working people during the years of dictatorship, demonstrating the importance of looking at communities. At a time of high rates of unemployment, the turn to the neighborhood has underscored the many aspects of workers’ everyday lives. Despite the clear intersections between labor and urban studies, only a few studies have brought them together. Peter Winn shows the strong influence of the neighborhood and the community institutions, such as sports clubs, on textile workers before the military coup. Unlike a previous generation of textile workers who had migrated from the countryside, Winn argues, the youngsters grew up in a radical working-class neighborhood. In his work about MADECO, Chile's largest copper manufacturing plant in Santiago, Joel Stillerman demonstrated the relationship between the factory and the surrounding community. Stillerman has also investigated how consumption practices and spaces changed under the Pinochet dictatorship. More work is still needed to connect the workplace to the neighborhood better and to explain how work or lack of work influenced working-class communities.⁶⁶ Another limitation of the urban literature for this period is its almost exclusive focus on Santiago, and we still know very little about urban communities located outside the capital city.⁶⁷

Working Women and a Feminist Labor Historiography

Intersecting with the urban and social movement discussion has been the outstanding work done by feminist scholars. In the 1980s, social scientists started paying increasing attention to the experience of working-class women at a time of economic crisis, political repression, and urban transformation. Until very recently, this was the work of social scientists, not historians, and was connected to Chilean research centers and NGOs working with women's organizations during the dictatorship. They incorporated a gendered analysis, looking at the experience of living under dictatorship from the female perspective. Women organizations like Women for Life played an influential role in the struggle for democracy and human rights movements and, in the process, challenged traditional gender norms. In the context of a growing feminist movement in the country, women's struggles were part of a larger historical narrative that went beyond the period of dictatorship and responded to the historical oppression of Chilean women.⁶⁸ In a research paper from 1987, Teresa Valdés summarized the concerns of women's studies at the time: “The military government places Chilean women under a double dictatorship: It adds a political dimension to the millenarian gender domination of a patriarchal society. This double oppression combined. Women carry the burden of the imposed economic model, and they become more vulnerable to ideological manipulation and terror.”⁶⁹ Aware of this double oppression, feminist activists and scholars began demanding democracy in the home as well as in the nation.

In the 1980s, women's studies in Chile contributed new paradigms, epistemologies, and methodologies. The projects were based on extensive fieldwork that included surveys, oral interviews, and ethnographic observations. Influenced by the work of Daniel Bertaux, Franco Ferrarotti, and Gaston Pineau, they explored how women lived through the time and the historical importance of personal narratives and testimonies.⁷⁰ One of the most influential NGOs working with women during the years of dictatorship was the Centro de Estudios de la Mujer (CEM), founded in 1984. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, CEM sponsored some of the most relevant research on women in the countryside (peasants, rural workers, and temporeras), indigenous women, women in the informal sector, and domestic workers. Its activities also included workshops for working women and pobladoras, an example of the intersections between research and activism that drove radical intellectuals in the 1980s and beyond.⁷¹

The feminist scholarship and its extensive collection of documents (interviews and testimonies) highlighted the presence of women as political actors, but also their economic role in the family, the relationship between women and informality, and the feminization of poverty.⁷² Women were central figures in their families but also the target of the military gender agenda.⁷³ For example, Teresa Valdés and Marisa Weirstein published an exhaustive overview of women pobladoras in 1993. Based on many years of working with women organizations in the greater Santiago metropolitan area, Valdés and Weirsten reflect that the economic changes and the repression of popular networks and social institutions transformed women's organizations.⁷⁴ Women became the pillar of human rights movements and fought for the return of democracy.⁷⁵

The political and social visibility of women under dictatorship, Thomas Klubock maintained, inspired the rise of a feminist scholarship and the efforts to incorporate women as historical subjects.⁷⁶ In 1992, the University of Santiago sponsored the first “Women's History Workshop,” bringing together a new generation of Chilean and US academics.⁷⁷ However, most of gendered labor history, Chilean historians María Soledad Zárate and Lorena Godoy stressed, has focused on the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.⁷⁸ Within that chronological era, historians have explored the experience of industrial workers, women's labor organizations, their contributions to the nitrate economy and, more recently, the construction of masculinity in the workplace, but a gendered labor history is still the exception, not the rule.

One of the exceptions is US historian Heidi Tinsman. Her first monograph focused on how traditional ideas of gender and family shaped the process of Agrarian Reform and subordinated women to a male-headed family. In a later article, she turned to the experience of women seasonal workers in export agriculture during the 1980s. By looking at gender, labor, and consumption, Tinsman provides a complex view of globalization and dictatorship. New job opportunities empowered women, opening opportunities for consumption and socialization. But the transformation of the countryside under the dictatorship had not only reversed the process of Agrarian Reform but also made jobs seasonal, feminized, and precarious. The new and modernized fruit packings, like the ones analyzed by Tinsman, relied on rural women who had never worked outside the home before and working-class women, who commuted from poor villages and cities. Despite the resilience of some of the traditional peasant organizations, rural workers faced immeasurable obstacles to organize.⁷⁹

Despite the growing influence of women and gender history in Chile, we still know very little about women's work experiences during the dictatorship and the rise of neoliberalism and globalization. Most of the scholarship continues to be based on women's roles in the Human Rights movement, and we know almost nothing about their participation in the labor movement. Emphases on the larger confederations as representative of the union movement and the most emblematic have contributed to marginalizing women from historical accounts. In contrast, understanding women's roles in the context of a changing labor market and the rise of new economic activities, such as the case of export agriculture described by Tinsman, would offer a more complex view of working class life under the Pinochet dictatorship.⁸⁰

New Directions

Between 1973 and 1989, Chilean workers suffered the violation of civil, political, and labor rights. They were also victims of neoliberal reforms and economic experiments. On the eve of the return of democracy, five million people lived in poverty, around 38 percent of the population. While social scientists have provided a periodization and general framework to place these changes, labor historians’ contribution is to provide a perspective from the bottom up. We still know little about how different groups of workers navigated the Labor Plan, how many strikes and labor negotiations took place, how technology and new managerial strategies transformed the workplace, and how repression and neoliberalism changed workers’ culture and worldview.

In 2004, Peter Winn edited a volume on Chilean workers’ experiences with neoliberalism and dictatorship, offering a myriad of cases from industrial and economic sectors. The chapters highlight stories from the margins of Chilean society, such as fishing and forestry, as well as traditional union enclaves, such as mining and manufacturing. The stories, Paul Drake states in his forward to the book, question “the most successful economic experiment in Latin America since the 1970s” and illustrate how the Pinochet dictatorship reshaped Chilean society, deepened economic inequality, and marginalized workers. Victims of the Chilean Miracle is a starting point for a larger social history of the dictatorship, one that centers on working women and men and how they lived, adapted, and resisted job restructuring, de-industrialization, and the privatization of education, social security, and health care.

Victims of the Chilean Miracle demonstrated the importance of case studies to understand the consequences and legacies of globalization, neoliberalism, and authoritarianism.⁸¹ While most workers suffered under military rule, the authors argued, there were some nuances. In the copper mines, economic restructuring and legal reforms caused a wave of protests including walkouts, marches, and hunger strikes. Copper workers were among the first to protest against the dictatorship and they played a leading role in the reorganization of a national labor movement. Although their unions have remained active and influential under democracy, they had to adapt to production restructuring and subcontracting.⁸² Like copper workers, metal workers have also faced rapid technological change and work restructuring since the late 1970s, while consumption and cultural change undermined the traditional ties that bind together the community. Textile workers faced a shrinking labor market and ruthless employers, and most of their strikes ended in massive layoffs. Thriving export activities such as fishing and table grapes became known for their female and seasonal workforce, meager salaries, harsh working conditions, and long working-hours. In the south of the country, the expansion of forestry plantations degraded the local ecology, displaced communities, and established an abusive work system based on subcontracting.

The underside of Chile's economic growth is the destruction of the natural environment and its legacies of environmental injustice. Working-class, peasant, and indigenous communities have suffered from the heavy use of chemicals and pesticides, toxic emissions, and water and soil pollution. In La Frontera, Thomas Klubock demonstrates the detrimental environmental and social impact of Chile's forestry industry on the landscape and society of southern Chile. He links Chile's rural labor history to its environmental history, arguing the importance of an environmental labor perspective. It is a new field in Chile, but is also one that still faces many obstacles before it can consolidate itself as a field of study.⁸³

Despite repression, workers organized at the national level. In 1976, a group of Christian Democratic and Radical unions protested the suspension of labor rights. Despite persecution, labor leaders continued to come together. Some met under the umbrella of the Catholic Church, while others started rebuilding old political networks. In the 1980s, national labor confederations participated in the protest movements, leading many of the national strike days. Rodrigo Araya has studied these efforts, demonstrating the contributions of the labor movement to the struggle for democracy. Based on a wide range of Chilean and international sources, Araya has integrated organized labor as an essential piece in the study of dictatorship and democracy.⁸⁴

A better understanding of workers’ experiences during the dictatorship requires overcoming Chile's traditional national focus and including a transnational perspective. Although the period of the Pinochet dictatorship could provide one of the most obvious spaces in which to explore transnational influences, comparative, international, and transnational labor studies of this period remain to be done. Peter Winn's remarks from 2013 are still valid: “fierce focus of Chilean labor historians and students on national—not international—labor history.”⁸⁵ Studies on international solidarity and the experience of Chileans in exile, such as Ann Jones’ study of Australian and British union solidarity, suggest the many possibilities of this perspective. “Trade unions were essential to the Chilean solidarity movement: throughout the dictatorship one union or another provided the base of support for solidarity activities. Trade unionists were among the most committed individuals to the solidarity movements.”⁸⁶ In her latest book, Heidi Tinsman analyzes the relationship between Chile's agribusiness boom and US consumption in the Cold War, paying special attention to how grapes became a symbol of labor abuses and a target of boycotts. Her work is a transnational study that integrates rural labor and gender history.⁸⁷

The possibilities of researching Chile's recent past are promising today. Chilean historians have worked hard to recover and publish primary source collections, memories, and oral interviews that speak about the everyday experience of working people. In 2009, Elizabeth Lira and Hugo Rojas made available the ILO reports on Chile, suggesting the importance of international documents. In 2014, Araya published an impressive collection of documents about the dictatorship that includes sources from Spanish and Chilean archives and personal collections.⁸⁸ Also relevant have been the publications of biographies, memoirs, collections of letters, and oral interviews. The memoir of Mireya Baltra, for example, not only offers a personal account of a union and communist activist and former Minister of Labor under Allende—Chile's first female cabinet member—but also a reflection on how the intersections of gender and class affected her history. Also, there are several efforts to compile the many contributions and to write biographies of emblematic labor leader Clotario Blest.⁸⁹ Additionally, new archival collections such as the Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad and FASIC are now open to the public.

In sum, in light of the recent historiographical turns, it is critical to examine the history of working people under the Pinochet dictatorship from a broad social history and transnational perspective. Building on the rich literature on the union movement, scholars can explore the relationship between labor confederations and grassroots organizations, account for other influences such as the Catholic Church and its labor department, and provide a bottom-up perspective on local labor unions, including those led by women workers. By incorporating workers’ living experiences, historians can begin to understand the devastating impact of neoliberalism on working-class communities and the complexity of those communities beyond the traditional blue-collar and industrial identity. Research on consumption, housing rights, sports, and gender and family has provided a more complex view of resistance, adaption, and transformation of work and life under Pinochet. Finally, it is time to overcome the historiography's focus on Santiago and include more regional and rural perspectives, as well as developing transnational angles.

In the last years of the dictatorship, Gabriel Salázar reminded academics that history was not the mere reconstruction of the past, but a way to use that past to create a more equal, just, and democratic society. Today in Chile, many workers still face precarious working conditions, long working hours, and enormous legal obstacles to organize and bargain collectively. Many more live and work in unhealthy and polluted environments. Although Chile continues to be a model of economic growth and political stability in Latin America, workers’ stories continue to challenge that image. In the documentary An nou pal, Haitian immigrants in Chile remind us of the contradictions of neoliberalism and the legacies of authoritarianism: working more than twelve hours a day including Saturday, living in crowded and unsanitary conditions, and having little money or time for family, recreation, or consumption.⁹⁰