Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973-2002 (review)

As I read this book, I remembered a bumper sticker that I occasionally saw on cars in Chicago during the 1980s, the period of Reagan economics. It read, "If you think the economy is working, ask someone who isn't." In parallel fashion, this book eloquently and pointedly challenges the myth of the "Chilean miracle" by focusing on the impact that neoliberal policies had and have on the Chilean working class and the labor movement. It concludes, as the title succinctly states, that Chilean workers were the victims, not the beneficiaries, of the so-called Chilean miracle.

Peter Winn has done an outstanding job of envisioning this project and organizing this book, in addition to contributing several chapters to it. The book's original case studies, Winn's powerful framing essay, and a helpful overview of the Concertación years by Volker Frank starkly reveal how devastating neoliberal economic policies have been on Chilean workers. The specific case studies focus on workers in the textile industry (Winn), the metallurgy industry (Joel Stillerman), the El Teniente copper mine (Thomas Miller Klubock), the agricultural sector (Heidi Tinsman), the fish industry (Rachel Schurman), and the forestry sector (Klubock).

One of the major contributions this book makes is that it centers on Chilean workers and their relationship to neoliberalism. Much of the recent focus on social movements (and why isn't the workers' movement considered a social movement?) has tended to obscure the pivotal role that the labor movement played in initiating the antidictatorial struggle in the early 1980s; equally ignored is how devastating the policies of both the dictatorship and the Concertación have been on workers and the labor movement. By focusing on workers, this book effectively dispels the image of Chile as an economic success story, at least as far as workers are concerned. The book also makes clear why scholars need to connect economic policies with workers. The latter's labor makes possible the implementation of the former, and economic policies strongly and directly affect workers, for better or worse. Another strength of this book is that it incorporates insights developed in gender, global, and cultural studies into the specific study of Chilean labor, thereby enriching all four fields.

The picture of Chilean workers that emerges from this book is a poignant one. Through decades of struggle and organization, the Chilean working class had forged strong alliances with left political parties, principally the Communists and Socialists; established powerful unions and the CUT (Central Unica de Trabajadores, the union confederation); developed a clear and dynamic political agenda; and won itself a place at the political bargaining table. These accomplishments brought with them, and indeed were the result of, a class-based identity and consciousness that shaped how generations of workers saw themselves, in relation both to each other and to the Chilean state. The 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, "the president of the workers," brought the victories enjoyed by labor to a swift, brutal, and painful end.

As the individual chapters make abundantly clear, one critical, unavoidable goal of the military dictatorship was to destroy this powerful labor movement, because the imposition of neoliberalism was predicated on the quieting of those sectors most likely and able to resist it. Many of the various methods used by the Pinochet regime to attack Chilean workers and their organizations, such as the imprisonment, torture, exile, and disappearances of labor leaders and activists, are well known. What this book contributes to the discussion is a close and specific examination of how the neoliberal economic policies imposed by the military regime affected workers and how workers responded to them.

Winn's opening essay provides a lucid and penetrating overview of the last three decades of Chilean political, economic, and labor history. It offers both a historical framework that facilitates the reader's comprehension of the specific...