ILPC 2026

In Chile, contemporary labor conflicts has gained a particular notoriety in the strategic sectors of the national export economy. In the attempt to reverse their precarious conditions and salaries, the workers of the copper mining, the forestry industry and the maritime terminals - who ship these merchandise- have staged important strikes in the last decade, overflowing by the way of the facts narrow labor legislation inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship.

In order to propose a model of analysis for the study of labor conflict described above, and paying attention to what I have called in the title as "the problem of temporalities", this paper examines the work stoppages inflicted by stevedores during 2011-2014 on the Chilean coasts.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss current studies on Chilean trade unionism, and particularly its exclusionary approaches between structure and agency, opposing them a reading that allows to gather both approaches from the unraveling of the different historically conjugated temporalities in the particular cases. The most extensive research in which it is framed is the study of the potentially conflicting role of labor traditions in the processes of precarious modernization.

By "temporalities" I mean the historical notion of time, whose analytical differentiation implies to distinguish time from long durations, conjunctures and events; whose approaches confer different degrees of autonomy to the agents with respect to the structures. By "the problem of temporalities" I understand the specific way in which these three temporalities overlap and shine in certain conflicts.

The hypothesis, therefore, is that labor conflicts always involve a set of different temporalities, and that in the case of port strikes, they should consider at least the nineteenth-century continuities in the organization of port operations, the conjunctural frameworks suffered by the work force as result of the modernization of maritime terminals initiated in the dictatorial context, and also the events that contributed to the outbreak of strikes in those years; as the substitution of government agents in charge of dealing with union organizations, produced by the arrival of the first right-wing government in Chile since the return to democracy in 1990. Without the analytical dismantling of these temporalities, labor conflicts can not be understood in its depth.

With this object, the entire bibliography on the Chilean stevedores of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries has been examined; particularly to entablish the longtime continuities. To document rigurously the strikes of 2011-2014, the crucial parliamentary reports, the workers declarations and press have been consulted to; in this last case, searching the employers complaints. The workers who staged them have also been interviewed in profundity.