Research Highlights Article
June 27, 2025
Consensus building and mobilization
Myanmar's labor unions show how local leaders can shape social movements.
Source: Unidentified, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>
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Leaders of social movements operate without the usual management tools of formal organizations, and yet have influenced some of the biggest changes in modern history, including the eight-hour-day and civil rights. How did these successful leaders manage to affect the inner workings of labor movements?
In a paper in the 蝌蚪网 Review, authors , , , and found empirical evidence that on-the-ground leaders of labor unions act not only as conduits of information that help coordinate members’ actions, but also play a critical role in shaping their views.
The authors drew their findings from Myanmar's nascent labor movement. Labor unions became legal in Myanmar in 2011, and by 2019 more than 10 percent of industrial plants had unions, significantly more than neighboring Bangladesh, where fewer than 2 percent of plants were unionized. This rapid growth allowed the researchers to do field experiments on a social movement during its formative stages, which hasn’t been possible in countries like the United States, where union membership has been declining for decades.
We think that individual leaders are very important coordinating devices in the context of social movements.
Laura Boudreau
Working with the Confederation of Trade Unions in Myanmar (CTUM), the country's largest labor umbrella organization, the researchers embedded field experiments in real union activities during preparations for minimum wage negotiations in 2020. They studied 17 garment factories, focusing particularly on so-called "line leaders"—shop floor organizers who serve as intermediaries between elected union presidents and rank-and-file workers.
The researchers conducted two main interventions. In the first, they randomly assigned line leaders to group discussions about minimum wage preferences, creating a controlled test of how leaders influence consensus building. Some groups included a leader from the workers' own factory, others had a leader from a different factory, and control groups had no leaders at all.
The setup was carefully designed to feel natural. "We worked really hard to make sure that there was no emphasis on who the line leaders were," Boudreau told the 蝌蚪网 in an interview. Workers from large factories were mixed together in discussion groups, and leaders weren't announced or given special instructions.
This consensus-building experiment showed that leaders don't simply aggregate what workers already think; instead, they actively align workers' views with the union's position. Groups with leaders showed 22 percent more consensus around the union's preferred minimum wage level compared to groups without leaders.
This effect worked even when the leader was from a different factory, indicating that personal relationships or formal authority weren't the primary drivers. "What these line leaders are doing is aligning people to the union's views," Boudreau said, rather than just finding the middle ground among existing opinions.
An analysis of discussion transcripts shows how this happened. Line leaders introduced information that supported the union's position and took active roles in guiding conversations although this sometimes came at the cost of crowding out worker participation.
Converging minimum wage preferences
The chart below shows the distribution of the absolute difference between workers’ preferences for the minimum wage and their line leader’s preference for both the control and treated groups. The treated groups show more bunching near zero, indicating convergence on line leaders’ preferences.
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In the second experiment, researchers tested whether leaders could mobilize workers to participate in an unannounced afternoon follow-up survey about living costs, mimicking the kind of costly collective action that movements often require from their members.
This mobilization experiment, while underpowered due to COVID-19 disruptions, provided suggestive evidence that leaders also help coordinate collective action. Successful mobilization leaned on telling members that many other workers were also invited to take the survey. This approach increased attendance by 36 percent compared to telling members that only one group member was invited.
Additional surveys revealed that union leaders are systematically different from other workers in ways that psychologists associate with influence and leadership ability. Leaders scored higher on extroversion, conscientiousness, and grit, while being less neurotic. They were also more altruistic. Despite these advantages, union leaders actually earned less money than regular workers—suggesting that they likely face workplace discrimination for their activism.
These findings may have implications beyond labor organizing. The mechanisms studied—building consensus around strategic positions and coordinating collective action—are fundamental challenges for any voluntary organization or social movement.
"We think that individual leaders are very important coordinating devices in the context of social movements," Boudreau emphasizes. The research suggests that leadership quality, not just grievances or opportunities, may help determine which movements succeed.
Myanmar's 2021 military coup, which effectively ended the legal labor movement, derailed the researchers’ planned follow-up studies. However, many of the same union leaders in their study later became central to political resistance against the military dictatorship, potentially demonstrating how coordination skills can translate to many different social and political movements.
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“Leaders in Social Movements: Evidence from Unions in Myanmar” appears in the June 2025 issue of the 蝌蚪网 Review.