Annually, work‐related mortality is responsible for 5–7% of all global deaths, and at least 1‐in‐9 workers experience nonfatal occupational accidents (ILO (2019a,b)). Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) committees are considered the key worker voice institution through which to improve workplace safety and health (ILO (1981)). I present evidence of OSH committees' causal effects on workers and on factories. To do so, I collaborated with 29 multinational apparel buyers that committed to enforce a local mandate for OSH committees on their suppliers in Bangladesh. With the buyers, I implemented a nearly year‐long field experiment with 84 supplier factories, randomly enforcing the mandate on half. The buyers' intervention increased compliance with the OSH committee law. Exploiting the experimental variation in OSH committees' strength, I find that stronger OSH committees had small, positive effects on objective measures of safety. These improvements did not come at a cost to workers in terms of wages or employment or to factories in terms of labor productivity. The effects on compliance, safety, and voice were largest for factories with better managerial practices. Factories with worse practices did not improve, and workers in these factories reported lower job satisfaction; this finding suggests complementarity between external enforcement and internal capacity in determining the efficacy of regulation.

Social movements are catalysts for crucial institutional changes. To succeed, they must coordinate members’ views (consensus building) and actions (mobilization). We study union leaders within Myanmar’s burgeoning labor movement. Union leaders are positively selected on both ability and personality traits that enable them to influence others, yet they earn lower wages. In group discussions about workers’ views on an upcoming national minimum wage negotiation, randomly embedded leaders build consensus around the union’s preferred policy. In an experiment that mimics individual decision-making in a collective action setup, leaders increase mobilization through coordination. (JEL D91, J38, J51, O15)