Collective Bargaining Coverage in Chile: Increase or Illusion?

Abstract

Collective bargaining in Chile is both underdeveloped and weak, resulting in very limited coverage. However, up to now, there is no exist an official percentage. The Labor Office, which is the state institution that collects the information about collective bargaining in Chile has systematically reported the percentage of salaried involved in collective instruments that start their validity every year, but not the percentage that considers workers involved in all the valid collective instruments (not only the starters). This is surprising and constitutes a research gap that has an impact on the public debate. In this backdrop, a recent OECD report has shown the Chilean collective bargaining coverage developments between 1990 and 2015. While the Labor Office reported in 2015 a coverage (considering only the starters) of 7.2%, the OECD has published 18.9%. Which is the real number? apparently, something has changed or works better in Chile based on such report. In this paper, we show that those figures are far to be accurate. Through a multi-step process, we correct the official numbers and estimate a collective bargaining coverage which oscillates between 11.1% and 6.9% in 2015.

Keywords: collective bargaining, coverage, statistics