Restructuring and the New Working Classes in Chile: Trends in Waged Employment, Informality and Poverty, 1973-1990

This paper discusses the reorganization of the labour market, and the
redefinition of poverty, which accompanied the neoliberal experiment of 1973-1990 in Chile. The
first decade of authoritarian restructuring (between the military coup of 1973 and the debt crisis of
1981-1982) was marked by rapidly rising unemployment, a fall in waged work, a growth in urban
informal employment and an increase in marginality. All of these might be considered indicators of
economic exclusion. During the following decade, however, such labour market trends were
reversed. Poverty continued to constitute a grave problem, affecting an estimated 40 per cent of the
population in 1990. But it was associated less with exclusion than with a new form of inclusion in a
national economy and society undergoing a process of profound qualitative change.