From Indenture to Electronics: Brokered Labor Regimes in Johor, Malaysia

Abstract This article develops the concept of a brokered dormitory labor regime (BDLR) to analyze Johor, Malaysia’s electrical and electronics export-processing zones, where debt-financed recruitment, deceptive contracting, and restricted mobility synchronize labor turnover with the accelerating demand for semiconductor manufacturing driven by artificial intelligence. Two intermediaries, the labor agent and the kadar, secure this synchronization by controlling workers’ social reproduction. Tracing this regime’s genealogy to the nineteenth-century kangani and kangchu systems in the Straits Settlements, the article argues that the BDLR reactivates a colonial infrastructure of coerced migrant labor, revealing a recurring pattern of asynchronous synchronization between capital and labor across successive industrial revolutions.