Obraje workers, according to Gareth Austin & Kaoru Sugihara's Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History were generally indebted Indians who were either, 'voluntarily' or 'forcefully' recruited. The workforce often in inclued black slaves, apprentices and prisoners sent to the obrajes instead of jail.
Workers usually lived within the obraje premises and were not allowed to go out until their debts were redeemed.
Obrajes in Otavalo, a town in the Imbabura Province of Ecuador, workers could only be drawn from distances that enabled then to travel to work daily. So in order to expand pool of labor, were orderd to settle in town so that they could home at night.
Richard J. Salvucci, in his book Textiles and Capitalism in Mexico: An Economic History of the Obrajes, 1539-1840, cites a darker image of how workforce for obrajes in Mexico were recuited.
An excerpt from the book reads:
In his Relación de mando to the Marqués de Valero (1716-22), the Duque de Linares (1710-16) wrote that the obrajes recruited labor through "deception by the peso." "[The obrajes] hold [the workers] in such violence, "that if one them should happen to die, or to flee, they seize their wives and children as slaves."
"Poorly instructed in the faith, and worse fed," he concluded, "they suffer in a Christian land that is unknown among barbarians." Linares's view was not a new one. The labor problem was coeval with the obraje and was its reason for existence.
Without a well developed market, the obraje recruited, retained, and maintained the labor force necessary for sustained production.