From Militancy to Clientelism: Labor Union Strategies and Membership Trajectories in Contemporary Chile

For the past 30 years, Chilean unionism has been shrinking. Through a comparison of the membership trajectories of 26 unions in two firms between 1990 and 2004, this article explains why some unions defied this trend and how their success affected overall union density in their firms. It argues that the unions that experienced the most favorable membership outcomes were those that, at key junctures of firm restructuring, earliest or most aggressively established a partnership relationship with management. However, in a context of great labor weakness, these cases of union accommodation took the form of exclusive patron‐client exchanges, which exacerbated collective action problems and further eroded union density.