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Hawkers' Hawker: Fighting for the Underdog - IQ Interview with Melvin Chew

Inconvenient Questions

2,940 views

It’s the first time I am hearing FIRST HAND what it takes to be a hawker – from a hawker! Getting up daily at 4am to prepare ingredients, get to the hawker centre at 6am, cook and prepare food non-stop in an unbearably hot kitchen, deal with and be abused by customers, and if your food is popular you must be prepared to whip up over 200 plates of it every day!

All this to earn an average income of between $2k and $6k per month!

Rent is going up. Working conditions are going down. “Work-life balance” – what’s that? Hawkers too have spouses, children they don’t see awake.

We want hawker centres to last forever. It’s not going to happen. The HAWKER DAYS HERE ARE NUMBERED. It’s an URGENT PROBLEM. We can’t keep kicking the can down the road.

Are we ready to ask ourselves practical, inconvenient questions?

I had a frank chat with MELVIN CHEW – a salt of the earth HAWKERS’ HAWKER.

YOU MUST WATCH IT, feel guilty. Act!

Viswa Sadasivan
Chief Editor, IQ
Former Nominated MP

#hawker #hawkerculture #singaporefood #streetfood #melvinchew #kfseetoh

0:00 Introduction
3:10 Hawkers United - Dabao 2020
5:35 Singaporeans' love of hawker food
7:15 Survival of the hawker trade
9:00 Melvin's background
13:00 Melvin's daily routine
14:20 Media marketing
21:10 Difficult conditions for hawkers
28:00 Hawkers' income
31:10 Will hawker centres still survive?
33:40 Hawkers and National Service
36:00 Ventilation in hawker centres
40:00 Attitudes among customers
46:50 AI and machines
50:00 Hawkers spending time with children
51:10 Melvin's appeal

6 Comments

@gabbyfoo2 3 months ago

Thank you Viswa Sadasivan for producing this very important EPISODE...and very brave of Melvin Chew for sharing the very challenging lives of being Hawkers ... We are so..so..SICK of hearing all this daily news of Ai..Ai..Ai..Please Ai is destroying jobs on a GLOBAL SCALE..,..If Hawker Centers in S'pore die off......That'll be the end of Tourism in S'pore etc..etc..etc..Yep I hope my latter prediction will not bear fruit.....🙏🙏🙏

@cybergod77 3 months ago (edited)

For the hawker's comfort and ease of working, NEA needs to install better exhaust and fan systems and increase the stall size by 30-50%. The new hawker centres at new towns like punggol have a much better layout and heat management systems

@rajithmohan7545 3 months ago

Insightful..

@kennySg101 3 months ago

Guess the agencies who are responsible for hawker centre should review their mission to look at hawker culture, welfare of hawkers n users. Not just ensures cleanliness of food n hawker center. As SG promote local food to Tourists, SG food has become a tourism product, efforts must be have enough sitting areas for local n tourists. More sitting areas can be added next to hawker center to cater for that. For example, convert part of car park next to Maxwell road hawker centre as sitting areas. During lunch hours office workers around the areas often find it difficult to get seat. Eventually, we need to install Aircon for all hawker centers given global warming. To be fair, NEA had tried their best to improve ventilation of hawker centre. My message to all Singaporeans, hawkers are doing charitable work to cook for us. If you know the efforts they put in n the the income they earn. It is pure charity. Support n treasure them. Like the host said, we may not see hawker center in 10-20 year's time. Be grateful n supportive. A shout-out to Melvin for what he has done for hawker esp during COVID-19.

@stevenlee5019 3 months ago

In my opinion, this G will manage the hawker problem like how they are managing the TFR ~ they will think they are already doing good and when it is close to beyond redemption, then start finding reasons for a "reset" when it could have been better managed when the plight of our hawkers are consistently being brought up. They just don't listen and thinks that their "data" is better than what the ground is telling them.