Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002 9780822385851
An attempt to gauge the impact of Chile's neoliberal reform policies and of the Chilean "economic miracle"
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Citation preview
victims of the chilean miracle
edited by peter winn
V ICTIMS OF THE C HILEAN M IRACLE Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002
with a foreword by Paul Drake
Duke University Press § Durham and London § 2004
2nd printing, 2006 ∫ 2004 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Quadraat by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.
in memory of my parents, who fought for labor rights in hard times, and for the chilean workers who struggled in the face of dictatorship and neoliberalism for the right to shape their own destiny
Contents
ix paul w. drake Foreword xv Acknowledgments 1 peter winn Introduction 14 peter winn The Pinochet Era 71 volker frank Politics without Policy: The Failure of Social Concertation in Democratic Chile, 1990–2000 125 peter winn ‘‘No Miracle for Us’’: The Textile Industry in the Pinochet Era, 1973–1998 164 joel stillerman Disciplined Workers and Avid Consumers: Neoliberal Policy and the Transformation of Work and Identity among Chilean Metalworkers 209 thomas miller klubock Class, Community, and Neoliberalism in Chile: Copper Workers and the Labor Movement During the Military Dictatorship and the Restoration of Democracy 261 heidi tinsman More Than Victims: Women Agricultural Workers and Social Change in Rural Chile 298 rachel schurman Shuckers, Sorters, Headers, and Gutters: Labor in the Fisheries Sector 337 thomas miller klubock Labor, Land, and Environmental Change in the Forestry Sector in Chile, 1973–1998 389 Bibliography 409 Contributors 411 Index
paul w. drake
Foreword
Peter Winn and his coauthors have the audacity to challenge the most successful economic experiment in Latin America since the 1970s. They do so by examining the human underside of the glowing aggregate data. While conceding numerous vaunted achievements from 1973 to 1998, these scholars argue that many workers in a wide range of sectors su√ered from Chile’s neoliberal ‘‘miracle.’’ They also contend that this market-oriented model had a di√erential and sometimes worse impact on women. At the same time, they expose the damage to the environment. This book is not, however, merely an exercise in ‘‘victimology,’’ for it emphasizes the agency and resistance of labor as well as its mistreatment and misfortune. Winn deserves credit for questioning the conventional wisdom about Chile’s economic triumphs. He also makes a valuable contribution by showcasing the innovative and gracefully written research of a talented new generation of Chileanists. Most unusually, he has produced a remarkably integrated, cohesive, and coherent collection, not simply another patchwork of loosely related articles. Just as Chilean capitalists have imposed discipline on their workers, so this editor has on his authors. As the paragon of neoliberalism in Latin America, Chile is the crucial test case for the consequences of those market-driven policies for the working class. It has been hailed as the shining example not only for Latin America but also for other parts of the world. If the ‘‘Washington consensus’’ on the free market has produced economic and social well-being anywhere, it must be in Chile, which has been on that path longer than any of its neighbors. In the wake of the hemispheric economic downturn at the end of the 1990s, discontent with neoliberal economics mounted throughout the region, but least of all in Chile, which, despite declining from its earlier boom, continued to outperform other countries. Moreover, rising disillusionment with open markets did not spawn any clear alternative formula, least of all in Chile, which
remained firmly committed to that approach. However rocky and uneven, that route to modernization had lifted the country to new heights. Instead of switching tracks, Chile, like the international financial institutions and many other nations in Latin America, pledged to adjust the model in order to pay more attention to poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation. Therefore this anthology arrives at a propitious moment, when Latin Americans are reevaluating the results of neoliberalism for the most vulnerable members of their populations, expressing dismay at the exclusion and deprivation of vast numbers of their fellow citizens, and groping for new solutions to social injustices, whether those remedies can be found within or outside the reigning paradigm. In assessing the Chilean experience, it is important to highlight three distinctions: the conditions under the dictatorship versus those under the democracy, the absolute levels of income versus the relative distribution of income, and the impact on workers in general versus the impact on organized labor in particular. In the first case, it was no secret that workers bore the brunt of the repression and economic reorientation under Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (1973–90). What was more surprising was that they fared less well than expected under the democratic governments of the Concertación (1990 onward), whose takeover was a tremendous victory for the working class and its political allies. The authoritarian regime devastated labor by smashing political parties aligned with workers, shackling union activities, and imposing neoliberal economic restructuring. By contrast, the democracy liberated the political parties, relaxed the hobbling union legislation but only slightly, and continued the neoliberal model while improving many social aspects. Because the overwhelmingly negative authoritarian period has received more scholarly attention, this foreword will concentrate on the contradictory situation in the 1990s. Despite shortcomings, the Chilean economic record of the last quarter century, especially since the return of democracy in 1990, attracted ardent defenders. Small wonder, since the 1990s combined spectacular stability, growth, and poverty reduction. Enthusiasts lauded the stunning overall statistics.* From 1990 to 1996, the economy grew at an annual average of over 7 percent, surpassing the rates under the military government. Unemployment and underemployment shrank. Meanwhile, inflation fell to single digits. Education, health, and life expectancy soared, as social expenditures per inhabitant escalated over 7 percent per year, with the most progressive allocation in Latin America. *All the data in this essay are taken from Paul W. Drake and Iván Jáksic, eds., El modelo chileno: Democracia y desarrollo en los noventa (Santiago: lom, 1999).
x . Paul W. Drake
Unlike many other converts to the marketplace, democratic Chile not only spurred growth but also slashed poverty. From 1990 to 1996 the share of the population living in poverty plummeted from 39 percent to 23 percent (the resulting percentage ranked about in the middle among Latin American countries) and those in indigency from 13 percent to 6 percent. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of Chileans remained trapped in deplorable conditions, as this anthology underscores. Many workers made gains: from 1990 to 1996 labor productivity rose an annual average of 4 percent, employment 3 percent, and real wages 5 percent, while unemployment hovered between 6 percent and 7 percent. Nevertheless, even those who prospered still encountered exploitation in many ways, particularly in terms of wretched working conditions, such as insecure jobs, weak unions, and inadequate social services. In a poll in 1998, 53 percent of the population agreed that the economy had improved under democratic rule, but 83 percent said that their own lives had not gotten better. Politically, economically, and socially, many workers gained significantly from the return of democracy, but not as much as they had hoped. While Chile’s democratic presidents curtailed absolute poverty, they did not reduce inequality, a much harder task without massive government intervention that would violate the limits of the model. From 1990 to 1996 the share of national income of the poorest 20 percent of the population stagnated beneath 4 percent, while that of the richest 20 percent inched up from 56 percent to 57 percent. In other words, in 1996 the top one-fifth of income earners garnered fourteen times the income of the bottom one-fifth. Indeed, the distribution of income was one of the most unequal in the world. In Latin America, only Brazil was worse. While some women toiled under the harsh regimen described in this book, others had trouble finding work at all. At 37 percent, female participation in the urban workforce registered one of the lowest in Latin America. Only Brazil exhibited greater salary discrimination than Chile, where women earned an average of 25 percent less than their male counterparts. Among union members in Chile, only some 21 percent were women. When assessing the outcomes of Chile’s economic policies, it is necessary to distinguish between their consequences for workers and for the labor movement. Among workers, there were, of course, winners as well as losers, supporters as well as critics of the hegemonic orthodoxy. Whereas the results for laborers varied across subgroups, the ramifications for organized labor were much more uniformly negative. Viewed as an impediment to the unfettered functioning of markets, unions were undercut first by the reign of terror
Foreword . xi
of Pinochet and second by the exigencies of development spearheaded by the private sector. As this book reveals, unionists reeled from macroeconomic transformations such as privatizations, sectoral shifts away from manufacturing toward services, decentralization of production, and downsizing of a porous social safety net. They also lost ground due to changes at the workplace, notably mechanization, flexibilization, individualization of pay and perquisites, fragmentation of the workforce, precarious or temporary employment, subcontracting, long hours, onerous working conditions, and inadequate benefits. Unions were handicapped in resisting these changes because of legal and informal restrictions on labor rights and collective bargaining and because of lack of support from their historic political champions, even when they held power. After recuperating briefly in the first flush of democratization, the proportion of workers involved in unions and collective bargaining diminished between 1992 and 1998. The percentage of workers in unions went from 14 percent in 1986 to 22 percent in 1991 and then 16 percent in 1997. The percentage of workers covered by collective bargaining went from 9 percent in 1986 to 14 percent in 1991 and then to 11 percent in 1996. In the 1990s the number of unions grew, while their average size shriveled. The emasculation of unionized laborers under the democracy as well as the dictatorship suggested that economic restructuring did them even more permanent harm than did authoritarian coercion. This impression was fortified by the international trend for trade unions to lose sway under globalization, almost regardless of the political regime. In the 1990s both of the traditional vehicles for working-class conquests in Chile—labor unions and political parties—lost relevance. They could no longer exert much leverage on a restrained state. Along with laborers, Chilean environmentalists voiced frustration at trying to get the state to compensate for market failures. By contrast, business leaders and conservative economists averred that e≈cient market mechanisms inevitably entailed certain costs for nature as well as nurture, warning that excessive interference by the public sector would dampen prosperity. Defenders of the environment and labor failed to convince the government that rapid growth might be unsustainable when it damaged the country’s natural and human resources. This book focuses on those Chileans who gained relatively little from the economic juggernaut. At the beginning of the 21st century, the neoliberal regime faced two major challenges. Could it sustain growth, and could it provide better treatment to those who had been marginalized? Although neither chal-
xii . Paul W. Drake
lenge was easy, the record to date indicated that the prognosis for the first had to be more optimistic than for the second. Perhaps studies like this collection will inspire new strategies to wed growth with equity, or perhaps more likely, a successor volume in the near future will find little change. La Jolla, California
Foreword . xiii
Acknowledgments
This book emerged out of a panel of the same name at the Latin American Studies Association meetings in Guadalajara, Mexico. The enthusiastic response of the scholars—Latin American and North American—who attended the session motivated the presenters, Thomas Miller Klubock, Joel Stillerman, Heidi Tinsman, and myself, to write and publish this edited volume on the impact of the Pinochet dictatorship and the neoliberal policies it initiated and imposed on workers in di√erent sectors of the Chilean economy. We want to thank all who attended that panel, in particular Paul Drake, who chaired it and generously agreed to write the foreword for this book, and Francisco Zapata, whose perceptive comments as discussant helped shape the revision of those presentations for publication. Volker Frank, who attended that session, was inspired to join us and to o√er his critique of labor policy under the Concertación governments of the 1990s as his contribution. At the suggestion of the readers for Duke University Press, we added chapters on workers in the forestry and fisheries sectors. We want to thank them for their helpful comments. We are also indebted to many Chilean scholars for their work and their help. The authors of this book acknowledge their intellectual debts in their respective chapters. Here I only have space to pay tribute to a few scholars whose contributions have been more global: Tomás Moulian, whose Chile actual punctured the triumphalism of the ‘‘Chilean Miracle’’ and made it possible to discuss it critically; and the many scholars, analysts, and activists of the Programa de Economía y Trabajo (pet) over two decades, from Jaime Ruíz Tagle to Jorge Rojas, who began the study of the impact of the dictatorship and its economic model on Chile’s workers when it was dangerous to do so and who helped give both workers and scholars the tools with which to understand the new situation of Chilean labor. We all stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. At Duke University Press, Valerie Millholland has been both supportive and patient throughout the long gestation of this project and deserves a special vote
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