5. ‘We Are the Engine of the Enterprise, and Yet, We Are Like Its Illegitimate Children’: The Contract Workers’ Movement in Chile and Its Claims for Equal Labour Rights

In 2007, few people anticipated that Chile would witness its major labour mobilization since the reinstatement of democracy in 1990. In June that year, contract workers of CODELCO, the country’s main state-owned copper-extracting company, mobilized and staged a 37-day-long strike that caused considerable economic losses. The fact that the protests were staged by contract workers, previously deemed unorganized and short of a unifying discourse, took most external observers by surprise. It contrasted sharply with the dramatic expansion of subcontracting arrangements, and the fragmentation of the trade union movement in the preceding three decades. These protests also showed that although the segmentation of the labour market according to job status had created tensions between CODELCO’s permanent staff and its contract workers, the latter were sufficiently organized to put pressure on the state giant on their own. Indeed, as Sehnbruch (2010, p. 145) notes, the increase of subcontracting arrangements has backfired; that is, when contract workers get together, they can paralyse an entire industry.