Union women and the renewal of Chile’s labor movement

Image by the See Red Women's Workshop, used under a Creative Commons License.

Opinion • Andrea Sato • May 17, 2024 • Leer en castellano

Antonia López* takes public transportation to pick up her six-year-old son, Camilo, from school in a suburb of Santiago. At 6 p.m. on a Friday, her bus is full of workers who are trying to get home as quickly as possible. 

Camilo hugs his mother when she gets to the school gate. He gives her the macaroni necklace that he has been working on all week. Sunday is Mother's Day in Chile. López takes Camilo by the hand and they walk back to the bus stop. She carefully puts away the necklace that her son made for her and pays the bus fare.

This bus is emptier, as they are now heading toward downtown Santiago, against the current of workers returning home. López, who has been working as a cashier at Walmart for seven years, is on her way to a meeting of her union.

When they arrive, Camilo recognizes his friends in the courtyard of an old colonial building. The little ones see each other every three months while their mothers take part in union meetings.

There are 133 unions at Walmart Chile; 110 of them are grouped into seven federations. In 2016, unionization at the transnational supermarket chain reached 69%, greatly exceeding the rate of unionization among Chilean workers generally. 

Although Walmart has one of the highest rates of unionization in Chile, labor relations policies that date to the military dictatorship (1973–1990) allow multiple unions to exist simultaneously, fragmenting workers' power. 

The federation to which López belongs does not have its own office, so it meets at the headquarters of a construction worker’s union. There, in a dark and damp building in central Santiago, the meeting begins. The main topic that Friday was the extension of the working day in a way that would prevent mothers from enjoying Mother's Day. 

In Chile, a war has been waged against the working class. There are no privileges for trade union leaders and labor leaders are mistreated and persecuted. Even so, many women are joining unions, a subversive development that is a source of hope, despite the devastating setbacks that organized labor in the county has suffered. 

Women workers were not included in Chile’s revolutionary process, but today they are building radical alliances within hierarchical and masculinized structures.

Image by the See Red Women's Workshop, used under a Creative Commons License.

Women trade unionists 

At the meeting, women trade unionists took turns explaining that Walmart was skirting the law that orders companies to give workers Sundays off or to pay them for working extra on that day and on other holidays. Management had compelled many of their co-workers to stay until closing at 10:00 PM and to work on Sundays. All of this in the context of confusion and manipulation resulting from the implementation of the reduction of the working day from 45 to 44 hours in the country. 

The women came up with various ideas: asking for a holiday to make up for having to work on Mother’s Day, a reduction in the working day, or asking part-time workers to cover the shifts of workers who are mothers. All their proposals ended in uncertainty, because the bosses will make the final decision. The unions can make proposals, but the bosses have the last word.

López is one of thousands of women who have joined unions in Chile over the last two decades. This is not her first job, but it is her first time in a union. After four years, she became shop leader and now serves as a national representative. 

Her work consists mainly of dialoguing with the union rank and file and in negotiating with representatives from Walmart Chile to improve working conditions. 

López's life mirrors those of other trade unionist women who have to balance the demands of domestic labor, paid work and union organizing.

The dictatorship and the destruction of trade unions

The military dictatorship in Chile severely weakened trade unionism and unionization rates remain below what they were before the 1973 coup d’etat. State terrorism dismantled the Popular Unity project, in which the working class was the protagonist in building a new Chile. 

The revolution in democracy put forward by President Salvador Allende spooked global capital, which mobilized against the Chilean working class and installed an early version of neoliberalism in the country. Military regimes and authoritarian governments quickly spread this economic and political experiment throughout the region. 

Neoliberalism is a regime of flexible accumulation in a new phase of globalized and financialized capitalism. It was the key mechanism in the ruling class’s offensive against labor, through which it sought to restore the rate of profit.

Neoliberals aimed to "make Chile a country of owners and not of proletarians," in the words of dictator Augusto Pinochet. His regime hoped to silence workers and turn them into consumers, not agents of social change.

After the transition to democracy, authoritarians cemented their grip on culture and politics in crucial ways, and Chileans watched as Pinochet settled into his seat as a senator for life in Congress. His plan had worked. The economic and cultural form permeated society’s innermost fibers and Chile became a model throughout Latin America. Chile’s capitalist counter-revolution became its best-known export.

Image by the See Red Women's Workshop, used under a Creative Commons License.

The new trade unionism

Chilean students and workers erupted in protest in the early 2000s. First there were massive strikes in strategic production sectors and then huge demonstrations demanding the right to education. We were beginning to emerge from the slumber of the dictatorship and its democracy for the rich. 

According to statistics from the Directorate of Labour, in 2002, women held 33 out of every 100 jobs in Chile. By the end of 2022, that number had risen to 43. The rate of female union membership had also increased significantly in the period. 

In fact, between 2002 and 2017, the rate of unionization among women more than doubled, rising from 8.2 percent to 16.5 percent. 

According to data reviewed for this article, at the beginning of that period, 122,000 women belonged to unions. By 2017, that number had more than quadrupled to 488,000. For the first time, rates of union membership among women surpassed those among men. This reversed the gender gap, which had been persistent though narrowing. 

Over twenty years, Chilean women workers increased their share of the employment pie by 30 percent, while their share of the union pie rose by 115 percent, a figure that continues to rise.

A chart showing the rate of unionization as a percentage

Women—previously seen as weak or external to masculine union spaces—are today organizing within unions in the most precarious industries, driving the unprecedented increase in union membership.

The retail and services sector is the main wage-earning tranche in Chile’s labor market and unstable working hours and employment conditions are among its central characteristics. There is also a significant wage gap in this sector: half of those employed in retail and services earn less than 400,000 pesos (US$432) per month, which is below the minimum wage in Chile.

Within these spaces, where exploitation is most visible and cruel, and which are remote from masculinist ideals of trade union militancy, women are creating and testing new forms of labor organizing and strategies and tools of struggle.

Women also sustain their households economically and emotionally. They understand that being in a union means taking on a third shift—after work and domestic labor—in which they give their time, body and energy to the cause. 

López, like so many others, has the strength to carry out all the activities that are forced upon her in a world where she must fight to wrest a portion of her life from the clutches of capital. She knows that it is a grueling struggle, but also understands that she can’t do it alone. 

After the meeting that day, López and her son returned to their rented flat in a neighborhood far from the center. She told me that Camilo got cold on the way back. Temperatures in Santiago been dropping as low as minus 5 degrees Celsius. 

López told me that she immediately started preparing the next day’s lunch when she got home. She said that she was exhausted but also hopeful. Although the supermarket chain didn’t allow anyone to change their shifts that Mother’s Day, saying it is one of their biggest weekends for sales, some of her colleagues covered the Sunday shifts so that the mothers could get home early for Mother’s Day. 

López said that made her happy. Even though Walmart didn’t give them the time off, together they ensured the mothers among them got the day off.

In the end, friendship, solidarity and tenderness are strategies against capital.

*I spoke to López via Whatsapp. She was eager to share her story, but asked me to change her name because she recently struck for two weeks and fears reprisals.