Chile's Ley Karin: What Employers Must Know About the New Harassment Law

Chile's Ley Karin (Law No. 21.643) took effect on August 1, 2024, and fundamentally changed what Chilean employers — and multinationals with Chilean operations — must do about workplace harassment and violence. Named after Karin Salgado, a healthcare worker who took her own life after sustained workplace harassment, the law imposes concrete, auditable obligations: a prevention protocol, formal investigation procedures, and reporting channels that employees can actually use.

This guide explains what Ley Karin requires, who it applies to, and how to build the reporting infrastructure the law demands.

What is Ley Karin?

Ley Karin amends Chile's Labor Code to strengthen the prevention, investigation, and sanction of workplace harassment (acoso laboral), sexual harassment (acoso sexual), and workplace violence. It applies to all employers in Chile — private companies of every size, as well as public institutions.

Three changes stand out from the previous legal framework:

• Harassment no longer requires repetition. Under the previous standard, workplace harassment generally had to be repeated conduct. Ley Karin establishes that a single act can constitute harassment — dramatically expanding the range of conduct employers must be prepared to address
• Prevention is now a legal duty, not a best practice. Employers must implement a documented prevention protocol covering risk identification, training, and reporting mechanisms
• Investigations have mandatory procedures and deadlines. Reports must be handled through formal, confidential investigation procedures with defined timelines and protections for the reporting employee

The core obligations for employers

1. A documented prevention protocol

Every employer must implement a protocol for the prevention of workplace harassment, sexual harassment, and violence. The protocol must identify risk factors, establish preventive measures, define training programs, and — critically — specify the channels through which employees can report concerns safely and confidentially.

2. Confidential reporting channels

Employees must be able to report harassment or violence through channels that guarantee confidentiality. Reports can be submitted to the employer directly or to the Dirección del Trabajo (Chile's labor authority). Here is the strategic point for employers: when employees don't trust the internal channel, they go directly to the regulator — and the employer loses the opportunity to address the issue internally first.

3. Formal investigation procedures with deadlines

When a report is received, the employer must initiate an investigation following the legally defined procedure: written records, confidentiality guarantees, protective measures for the affected employee (such as separation of workspaces during the investigation), and completion within legally mandated timeframes. Investigations must be documented — and that documentation is what the Dirección del Trabajo reviews.

4. Protective and corrective measures

Employers must take immediate protective measures when a report is received and apply corrective measures when the investigation substantiates the complaint. Failure to act on a substantiated complaint exposes the employer to fines, labor litigation, and — under Chile's constructive dismissal doctrine (despido indirecto) — severance liability.

The penalties and litigation exposure

Non-compliance with Ley Karin's prevention and investigation duties exposes employers to fines from the Dirección del Trabajo, which scale with company size. But the larger financial exposure is in labor litigation: an employee who suffers harassment and demonstrates that the employer lacked the required protocol — or failed to follow its own investigation procedure — has a significantly stronger case, including claims for damages and constructive dismissal compensation.

There is also a compliance-adjacent reputational reality: Ley Karin cases are publicly visible, and Chilean media has covered early enforcement actively. Employers named in Ley Karin proceedings face scrutiny that extends well beyond the individual case.

What a compliant reporting channel looks like

Ley Karin requires confidentiality; a well-designed program goes further and offers anonymity, because the two are not the same. Confidentiality means the employer knows who reported but limits access to that information. Anonymity means the reporter's identity is never captured at all — which is what makes employees actually use the channel.

A reporting channel that satisfies Ley Karin and actually gets used has these properties:

• External and independent: Reports go to a third-party platform, not to the HR department of the same company the report concerns
• Available 24/7 in Spanish: Web, phone, and chatbot intake in the employees' language
• Anonymous with follow-up capability: The reporter receives a case code to check status and answer investigator questions without revealing identity
• Documented from intake to resolution: Timestamped, tamper-proof case records that map directly to Ley Karin's investigation documentation requirements
• Routing controls: Cases involving specific managers are automatically routed away from those individuals

A practical Ley Karin compliance checklist

• ✓ Draft and formally adopt your prevention protocol for harassment and workplace violence
• ✓ Communicate the protocol to all employees and include it in internal regulations (Reglamento Interno)
• ✓ Implement a confidential reporting channel — anonymous, bilingual, and available 24/7
• ✓ Define your investigation procedure with responsible parties, timelines, and confidentiality safeguards
• ✓ Train managers and supervisors on prevention, the new single-act standard, and their response duties
• ✓ Establish protective measures that activate immediately upon receiving a report
• ✓ Document everything: protocol adoption, training, reports received, investigations, and outcomes

Ley Karin turned workplace harassment prevention from a values statement into an auditable legal duty. The employers in the strongest position are the ones whose reporting channel produces the documentation the law requires — automatically, from the moment a report arrives.

How Integri-Line supports Ley Karin compliance

Integri-Line provides exactly the infrastructure Ley Karin contemplates: an anonymous, Spanish-language, third-party reporting channel with structured case management, protective routing, and a tamper-proof audit trail. AMITAI has operated in Chile and across Latin America for 25 years — the platform and its case-handling workflows were built for LATAM legal frameworks, not adapted to them after the fact.

For multinationals, one deployment covers Ley Karin in Chile, NOM-035 in Mexico, and equivalent obligations across the region — with a single case management backend and consistent documentation.

Conclusion

Ley Karin is one of the most consequential labor law changes in Latin America in recent years, and its logic is spreading across the region. The core of compliance is simple to state and hard to improvise: prevent, receive reports safely, investigate formally, and document everything.

The reporting channel is the piece that makes the rest work — because prevention protocols and investigation procedures are only as good as the reports that actually reach them.