Almost three decades after Cambodia first embraced neoliberalism, the plight of its working poor offers a stark picture of the impact that untrammelled growth has had upon the lives of the most vulnerable. The country has undergone a rapid transformation since 1991, from a largely agrarian to industrial and services sector-led economy (Hughes, 2003). Contrary to the promise of ‘decent work’ advocated by proponents of growth-led development (see for example, Goal 8, UN, 2015), the country's labour market exemplifies the tethering of low-waged and insecure work to burgeoning growth (Natarajan et al, 2019a; Lawreniuk and Parsons, 2020).

This chapter explores the case of labour exploitation in Cambodia's brick kilns, focusing on the unfreedom of their debt-bonded brick workers. Cambodia has seen a construction boom in recent decades, as part of its broader shift to neoliberal growth from 1991 (Hughes, 2003). Yet the country's sustained GDP growth has been accompanied by poor levels of job creation, with the majority of what limited jobs there are remaining informal, low paid and precarious (ILO, 2018a). Brick work in the construction sector is exemplary of this, involving physically exhausting and unsafe work, long hours, no protective equipment, and noted instances of child labour; and the majority of work in this sector is debt bonded. Development thinkers have acknowledged the centrality of low-waged work and insecure livelihoods to neoliberal transformation across the global South (Davis, 2006; Breman and van der Linden, 2014). Yet there remains some debate as to whether such structuralist views risk obscuring the agency and generative potential of such livelihoods (Gibson-Graham, 2008; Roy, 2011; Thieme, 2017).

We build on work which highlights the increasing centrality of debt as a focal point from which to understand evolving relations of work. As Lazzarato has argued (2012, 30), ‘indebted man’ offers a new form of ‘homo economicus’ under neoliberalism, where the labour–capital relation characterized by ‘effort-reward’ is compounded by creditors’ subjective control over debtors through guilt, and a morality of promising to repay.