ES.3Two Tiers, Stated Once
On paper a hawker in a public centre is a towkay. In every way that matters he is a worker: he must cook personally, cannot run more than two stalls, and has no business to sell when he stops. Yet the system protects him as neither. No one pays a share of his CPF (Central Provident Fund, Singapore's compulsory savings for retirement, health and housing), he has no injury cover and no paid sick leave, and his MediSave (the part of CPF that pays for health care) bill comes once a year, for the year before (Hawkers and Social Protection, C.4, The Protection Matrix: Overlaps and Gaps). Everything in the plan answers that, in one of two tiers, and each tier is paid for differently.
| The floor, for all hawkers | The heritage tier | |
|---|---|---|
| Who it is for | Every stallholder, celebrated or not: a hawker's life matters even where there is no famous recipe to keep. | The stalls that carry a dish worth keeping, the masters who want to teach it and the cooks who will carry it on. |
| What it is | Rent bands and a ballot, a table-cleaning fee subsidy, price freedom with Makan Vouchers for the households who need them, relief cooks, buying together, cover for the oldest, and in time the Protection Floor's savings and cover (Part II). | The Regulars' List, the Seed Bank's archive, Master Fellowships, apprenticeships, a stall for each graduate, the Taste Council, the Succession Mortgage, the Family Name Royalty and the Heritage Plate (Parts III–V). |
| Who pays | Mostly the State, through rules and a few Budget items. Those items come to about $234M over four years, including one round of Makan Vouchers, and 85% of that is vouchers diners can spend at any stall. Another 15% of what the plan spends over the four years ($3.00M) reaches every one of the 408 stalls at the pilot centres. | Gifts and the endowment: 57% of the plan's spend ($11.25M) goes to items only the 44 heritage-worthy stalls receive. About 83% of all the plan's spend is gift money. The successor pays for succession, out of the business. |
Figures: the ledgers (the plan's year-by-year cost tables) and the ask, in the Budget Book; the voucher round is assumed to start in Year 1. The comparison with every other kind of worker: Hawkers and Social Protection, C.4 and C.6.