Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • Chinese Overseas Workers in Indonesia

    This week’s issue of Tempo features several stories on Chinese laborers in Indonesia. The cover is as evocative as it gets:

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    “Welcome, Chinese Laborers,” the title reads.

    Under the headline “A Flood of Workers from the Panda Country”* [= Banjir Pekerja Dari Negeri Panda], we find a description of some of these workers. I am certainly not alone in finding the headline to be unnecessarily inflammatory and provocative. A flood? Hardly. But I do think that the details about how labor migration from China to Indonesia works are very interesting. Given that there are strict regulations on foreign labor in Indonesia to prohibit labor market competition, and given that most of the laborers described in that article are low-skilled manual laborers and machinists, how are these workers getting the permits they need?

    Well, one way is to take advantage of bureaucratic “weaknesses” [= kelemahan].

    Seorang kuli asing bisa mengantongi izin karena memanfaatkan “kelemahan” pejabat di bagian pelayanan perizinan.

    Pejabat bagian pelayanan tidak ketat menerapkan syarat: satu pekerja asing harus didampingi satu tenaga lokal. Dalam prosedur, dokumen biodata pekerja lokal harus dilampirkan bersamaan dengan biodata si tenaga asing.

    Seorang calo bercerita, biodata tenaga lokal pendamping hanya formalitas. Ia selalu meminta “klien”-nya menyerahkan biodata karyawan yang disebut sebagai tenaga pendamping. Ia meyakinkan, perusahaan tidak perlu khawatir karena pejabat Kementerian Ketenagakerjaan jarang mengecek keabsahannya. “Kalau ada pengecekan, ya, pura-pura sebagai tenaga pendamping,” katanya.

    A foreign laborer** can get a permit because of the “weakness” of the officials in the permit services division.

    Officials there do not closely follow regulations: a foreign worker must be paired with a local worker. Following the procedures, the biodata of the local worker has to be submitted together with the biodata of the foreign worker.

    But a fixer explained that the biodata of the local counterpart is just a formality. He always instructs his “clients” to submit the biodata of an employee who is deemed the counterpart. He assures them that the company does not need to worry because the officials of the Ministry of Manpower rarely investigate the validity of the data. “If they check, well, they pretend to be the counterpart,” he said.

    So, just fill out dummy forms. Or you can bribe an official.

    Salah satu calo memungut Rp 8,5 juta untuk mengurus izin satu orang tenaga kerja asing. Ia menjamin, dengan tarif itu, perusahaan sponsor memperoleh izin mempekerjakan tenaga asing (IMTA) dan kartu izin tinggal terbatas (kitas).

    One fixer estimated a price of approximatedly US$ 640 to arrange a permit for one foreign worker. He maintained that at this price, the sponsoring company would receive both a work permit (IMTA) and a limited-stay residency permit (KITAS).

    OK, so those are the details. What is the motivation, though? Given that Indonesia is a labor-rich country itself, with a good deal of labor market slack, why would a Chinese firm operating in Indonesia need to import low-skilled laborers from China? Well, according to one Indonesian manager, “etos kerjanya luar biasa” [= they have an extraordinary work ethic]. The other argument we find in the Tempo piece is that the machinery uses manuals that are printed in Mandarin.

    I wonder about that. There has been a lot of press coverage of Chinese workers in Africa, and lately also about Chinese workers in Latin America (see this recent story about Ecuador). I wonder if the recent rise in Chinese labor exports to Indonesia is just following the same pattern, or if it’s something different.

    NOTES

    * Describing countries by with reference to some stereotype is common in Indonesian. So “Panda Country” = China, Negeri Paman Sam [= Uncle Sam Country] is the U.S., Negeri Matahari Terbit [= Country of the Rising Sun] is Japan, Negeri Kanguru [= Kangaroo Country] is Australia, Negeri Beruang Merah [= Country of the Red Bear] is Russia, Negeri Matador is Spain. Some of these terms are more offensive than others.

    ** I love the use of the word kuli here. It shares the same root as—indeed, it is the same word as—coolie. The etymology of coolie is interesting in and of itself.

  • Malaysia’s GE13, Long Form Research Blogging Redux, and Statistics versus Econometrics

    A little over two years ago, I wrote a post on “Long Form Research Blogging” related to my series of posts on Malaysia’s Thirteenth General Election. I wondered at the time if there would ever be a way to published all of that in an academic journal.

    Through an unusual set of coincidences, I have managed to cannibalize a good deal of those posts in an article that is now in print. What’s unusual about the process? Just that the article is a commentary on another article which appears in the Journal of East Asian Studies which makes what I think are some erroneous conclusions about the relationship between ethnicity and votes for the Barisan Nasional coalition. The full-text is not yet available from the publisher’s website. But I have made a copy of the original article, my comment, and the authors’ rejoinder available here: PDF. This is of course only for your own personal use, dear reader.

    I think that the contributions speak for themselves. But I do want to flag one issue in NRVP’s rejoinder which I find puzzling. They draw on a distinction between statistics and econometrics as describe by Rob Hyndman, and describe me as taking a statistical approach.

    The argument above that Pepinsky makes against our use of the fractional logit model is an example of the difference in disposition between taking either a theory-driven or data-driven approach. While largely similar, econometrics is predominantly theory driven while statistics tend to be data driven. Therefore, an econometrician develops a model based on economic (and other relevant) theories while a statistician may build a model after looking at datasets. The econometrician subsequently confronts the model with datasets to test the theory. The interested reader can refer to Rob Hyndman’s blog post1 for interesting insights into the differences between the two. In this context, it can be said that our econometric model is theory driven while Pepinsky’s model is data driven.

    This is odd to me because I thought that I was taking the econometric approach, and they were taking the statistical approach! I mean, contrast that quote above with the following argument from NRVP about why they have opted to use ethnic population totals, which I argue are theoretically inappropriate as a substitute for ethnic population shares:

    • It would make the article too technical, distracting the reader from
      the political issues at hand.
    • Interpretation of isometric log-ratio transformed variables is difficult,
      even in linear regression models, thereby making it hard to
      make useful inferences.
    • No work has been done on how the isometric log-ratio transformation
      can be performed on quadratic variables and for interaction variables

    In lieu of the above, we decided to go with ethnic population totals as our measure of ethnicity, as the sum constraint would at least somewhat be removed. However, we acknowledge that this is not the best way to model ethnicity, which Pepinsky has correctly and strongly pointed out. Nevertheless, in our opinion, it is the better choice to model the data.

    That looks to me like NRVP are prioritizing statistical procedure over coherent theory. My view is that we should not do that.

    Readers who have slogged the whole way through this post might also be interested in Andrew Gelman’s thoughts on statistics versus econometrics.