Our Labor Group Director, Jocelyn Aros, spoke with LexLatin about the shortcomings and improvements in the implementation of the Karin Law in light of the proposal to suspend the law.
In Chile, Law No. 21,643—known as the Karin Law and in effect since August 1, 2024—amended the Labor Code and redefined the concept of workplace harassment in the country, while also incorporating new obligations regarding prevention, investigation, and sanctions for workplace harassment, sexual harassment, and workplace violence. Two years after its entry into force, the law has required organizations to implement protocols, reporting channels, and investigation procedures, while its practical application has revealed certain shortcomings that are now fueling the debate over the need to make adjustments.
On August 6, a group of deputies from the National Libertarian Party, the Republican Party, the PDG, and an independent caucus submitted a motion to the Chamber to suspend the effects of the Chilean law for five years, reinstating during that period the labor regulations in effect prior to August 2024.
Two days later, the Senate rejected the bill. The Senate leadership, headed by Paulina Núñez and Iván Moreira, described it as a step in the wrong direction, and the government shut the door on the proposal through Undersecretary of the Interior Máximo Pavez, who noted that freezing a current regulation does not seem reasonable.
According to figures from the Labor Directorate itself, between August 2024 and December 2025, 66,000 applications were filed under the regulation, of which 44% were rejected or deemed inadmissible—the report for 2026 has not yet been published. The Ministry of Labor, led by Tomás Rau, is reportedly finalizing the last adjustments to the text of the regulation before sending it to the Comptroller General’s Office.
“What we’re seeing is that the law isn’t being implemented correctly. We have to work on better implementation of the law, and that’s what this new regulation aims to do,” he stated.
President José Antonio Kast himself echoed this sentiment, arguing that laws can be improved. Although the bill was already rejected by Congress, the episode reignited an ongoing discussion among labor experts regarding the challenges posed by the regulation’s implementation and potential ways to adjust it.
The Problem of Overload
One of the arguments cited by the motion’s sponsors themselves to justify it was the overload of the complaint system: an average of nearly 22,000 complaints per semester. Some of the complaints fall outside the scope of the Karin Act, and the system faces difficulties in filtering and processing them.
“Out of a total of 44,212 complaints filed between August 2024 and June 2025, only 42% were correctly classified as falling within the scope of the law, while just 21.3% of the concluded investigations confirmed an actual violation. This indicates that the problem lies primarily in the initial admissibility screening and classification process, not in the fact that the substantive protections are excessive or misdirected. “In this scenario, we believe it is preferable to introduce specific regulatory adjustments rather than suspend the Karin Law entirely for five years, seeking to balance the decongestion of the system with the maintenance of the protections currently in force,” explains Jocelyn Aros, director of the Labor Group at az.
Luis Lizama, a partner at Lizama Abogados and founder of the Karin Act Observatory, attributes the system’s overload to three factors related to its design and operational capacity:
- the lack of a screening process for complaints that fall outside the scope of the law;
- the referral to the Labor Directorate of investigations that could be resolved internally;
- the agency’s limited enforcement capacity.
Added to this is the lack of capacity of an understaffed Labor Directorate. In 17 months, the Labor Directorate conducted 1,214 inspections, all of which were reactive, and none of which were initiated ex officio on a preventive basis.
“The first two issues can be corrected through regulations, and that is precisely what the draft presented on August 3 to the Superior Labor Council addresses. The third issue cannot be resolved by any regulation: it requires a budget and adequate staffing,” he comments.
Along the same lines, Luis Parada, partner and regional co-leader of the U.S. and Latin America labor practice group at DLA Piper – Chile, warns that companies face difficulties related to admissibility filters, deadlines for conducting investigations, and the Labor Directorate’s responsiveness. In his view, these limitations create friction in the day-to-day application of the law, especially in cases requiring complex investigations.
“Completely suspending the system would mean reopening the discussion on the entire framework for protection against workplace harassment, sexual harassment, and violence at work, and would also raise questions regarding Chile’s compliance with its international obligations in this area, particularly those arising from ILO Convention No. 190. “However, the discussion could provide a useful opportunity to review various aspects of the current legislation that, in practice, have proven to create implementation difficulties and place a significant burden on companies, workers, and administrative authorities,” he states.
The law provides for 30 days to resolve an investigation, but in practice the process is taking between six and eight months, with effects that go beyond the administrative realm and impact the work environment and business operations.
The Commitment to the ILO and the Consequences of a Suspension
In addition to administrative difficulties, a potential suspension of the Karin Law would also have had implications for Chile’s international commitments. The country ratified ILO Convention No. 190 on violence and harassment in the world of work in June 2023, which entered into force in June 2024. The Karin Act was part of the regulatory response to bring Chilean legislation into line with that standard. Its suspension for five years would therefore have sparked a debate regarding compliance with those obligations and a potential rollback of protective mechanisms.
According to the experts interviewed, one of the most significant changes would have concerned the definition of workplace harassment. Prior to the Karin Act, the definition of harassment generally required repeated conduct. The new legislation broadened this concept by allowing a single act of aggression or harassment to be considered workplace harassment. A potential suspension would have reinstated the previous standard and, furthermore, reduced the Labor Directorate’s authority to investigate such complaints.
Parada warns that the change would not be merely a matter of definition, but also of the tools available to the authority to intervene in these situations.
“Workplace harassment would, in principle, once again require repeated conduct to be classified as such, abandoning the current standard that allows even a single instance of aggression or harassment to be classified as workplace harassment. Likewise, the Labor Directorate would no longer have the powers it currently holds to intervene and investigate complaints of workplace harassment, essentially retaining only its authority regarding sexual harassment,” he clarifies.
The elimination of this administrative avenue would not have left labor disputes unresolved. The duty to protect set forth in Article 184 of the Labor Code, the procedure for the protection of fundamental rights, and the right to resign as a form of dismissal regulated in Article 171 would have remained in effect.
The director of az’s Labor Group points out that, without the administrative remedy provided for by the Karin Law, a greater number of workers could turn directly to the courts through actions to protect fundamental rights, which would increase litigation and prolong the time it takes to resolve these cases.
The Cost to Companies That Have Already Complied
A potential suspension would also have created uncertainty for companies that had already adapted their internal systems to the Karin Law. The problem would not lie solely in the resources allocated to its implementation, but in the difficulty of determining which measures to maintain, modify, or strengthen in the face of a change in the legal framework. Furthermore, in multinational companies, internal compliance standards typically align with global corporate policies, which do not depend exclusively on Chilean legislation.
“For companies that did their homework, the suspension is a pure cost with no benefit. Over the past two years, they incorporated the prevention protocol into their internal regulations, established reporting channels, trained teams, and hired external investigators. None of that is recoverable; and in practice, no serious organization would dismantle the system, because the duty to protect remains in force and because the parent companies of multinational corporations apply global compliance standards that are not lowered simply because a Chilean law is suspended,” clarifies the partner at Lizama Abogados.
Th partner, who is also the founder of the Ley Karin Observatory, argues that the public debate over a possible suspension could have undermined workers’ trust in internal reporting channels. If the regime’s continuity were in doubt, some workers might have chosen not to use those channels and subsequently taken their disputes to other authorities. For companies, this scenario would also have made it difficult to plan new investments in compliance and forced them to manage different regulatory regimes over an extended period, depending on the date of the events.
In this regard, Aros believes that organizations with foreign parent companies or ESG commitments would have greater incentives to maintain their own standards for prevention and workplace harmony, while those that rely primarily on legal requirements might scale back their measures. The result would be an uneven application of these standards across companies.
Parada, for his part, frames the debate in terms of a shift in organizational culture that, in his view, has already taken hold in many companies. The adoption of new guidelines for workplace relations, leadership, and the prevention of psychosocial risks would not depend solely on the Karin Act being in force; therefore, a potential suspension would be unlikely to reverse these practices.
Concerns About a Temporary Suspension
The proposal to suspend the regulation for five years raises a legislative technicality. It is neither a permanent repeal nor an amendment, but rather a temporary suspension of its effects and a return to the previous regime. The complexity lies in the fact that several of those provisions were expressly repealed when the new regulation took effect.
Parada believes that this approach would not allow for the assumption that the previous regulations would automatically come back into effect. Its implementation would require defining which provisions would once again apply and how they would be reincorporated into the legal system.
Lizama characterizes the proposal as a temporary repeal accompanied by the restoration of the previous regime—an exceptional legislative technique that should expressly specify which regulations would once again apply. Aros agrees that the approach raises questions about which regime would apply during those five years and could create gray areas in its implementation.
Regulations as a Means of Correction
In light of this alternative, the experts propose focusing the changes on the regulatory path and reserving any potential legislative reform for those aspects that cannot be resolved through that route. The proposal seeks to introduce adjustments without broadly altering the current framework.
Parada proposes prioritizing the following measures:
- Incorporate a preliminary admissibility stage to screen out complaints that do not meet the legal definitions.
- Extend the investigation deadlines for companies, aligning them with the actual complexity of the cases.
- Strengthen the operational capacity and resources of the Labor Directorate.
- Allow for the use of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms for less serious conflicts as an alternative to an investigation.
- Review certain areas of regulatory uncertainty, particularly regarding the grading of conduct and associated penalties related to sexual harassment—an issue that neither the previous nor the current legislation expressly addresses and that has been the subject of debate in case law.
For her part, Lizama proposes that any subsequent reform be based first on the experience gained with the new regulations. Her approach is to implement the adjustments, strengthen the Labor Directorate’s oversight capacity, and evaluate the results before deciding whether additional legal changes are necessary.
Meanwhile, Aros shares the preference for a gradual approach. For the director of az’s Labor Group, the goal should be to reduce the system’s operational burden without altering the protections already in place.
