Isolation as a Mechanism of Control: Migrant Workers, Forced Labor, and Well-Being in Malaysia’s Textile Sector

Abstract

This study examines isolation, identified by the International Labour Organization as an indicator of forced labor, as a structural mechanism of control shaping the well-being of migrant workers in Malaysia’s textile manufacturing sector. Isolation is conceptualized as a multidimensional condition spanning geographic separation, restricted mobility, social and cultural disconnection, and constrained communication, which together sustain dependency and limit exit options. Using a convergent mixed-methods design, the study draws on a structured survey of 97 documented workers, incorporating the Personal Wellbeing Index, and in-depth interviews with workers in Johor, Penang, and Selangor. Across both strands, isolation emerged consistently as a condition associated with reduced objective well-being, including access to healthcare, housing quality, and autonomy, and with heightened subjective harms such as loneliness, low mood, and cultural alienation. Workers’ accounts indicate that isolation operates not as an incidental byproduct of migration but as an enabling condition for coercive labor relations, even within formally regulated employment. Read alongside the concept of functional isolation in the trafficking literature, the findings reframe isolation as one interacting tactic within a broader coercive environment. The study contributes to trafficking and forced labor scholarship and points to communication access, accommodation regulation, and isolation-sensitive labor inspection as practical anti-trafficking measures. The analysis is descriptive and interpretive rather than inferential, reporting patterns and lived experience rather than statistical association.