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

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 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