| Dials | Relief days that count as personal operation: up to 30 a year, more with a medical certificate, approved unless NEA objects within two working days (the Budget Book, B.7). The Corps builds on NEA's joint-operator and nominee routes; what it asks for is speed, two working days instead of four to six weeks, and a short-cover variant, not a new rule (the Plan, §2.7). The number of relief cooks at each centre: about ten for every 100 stalls, two-thirds of them in the centre's first year – 15 in the first year and 23 after at Chinatown Complex, 4 then 6 at Geylang Serai, 8 then 12 at Tekka; relief cooks at a sixth centre wait for the tests of the Plan, §6.5 (the Budget Book, B.1, B.3–B.5). The cook's day: at most 12 hours, the Employment Act's limit. Pay is the Progressive Wage for a cook, with the 4 hours beyond the normal 8 paid at 1.5 times and employer CPF included: about $212 a day in 2026. On a 13-hour stall day, the stall's own assistant does the first hour of preparation (the Plan, §2.7). |
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| What it does | Relief cooks return the most per programme dollar (leverage 2.17), because a covered day keeps takings a closed day loses (D.7.1). The model assumes 10 days a year lost to illness or exhaustion, varied from 4 to 16 (Method, Levers and Data, F.2.1). |
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| What breaks first | The relief cook must keep the stall's customers, which is what the Plan, §2.7's documented-recipe rule is for (D.7.1). |
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| The named deputy | A short-cover joint operator: one registered assistant may run the stall for up to an hour a day, logged like the relief notice, without the joint operator's four-hour minimum. The dial is the hour: the model gives the hawker back one of his 13, at no extra wage. Added to price freedom, vouchers, the Corps and the Protection Floor, it lifts the rent a typical tendered hawker can pay before he earns less than his assistant from about $1,540 to about $1,830 a month – more than any of the other four additions (the Plan, §2.7; D.4.1). What breaks first is trust: if NEA reads the hour as a sublet, the safeguards (one named person, capped hours, a log) are what answer it. |
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| Fallback | In downside mode the two Lighthouses' relief cooks, 23 and 6, run alone (the Budget Book, B.8). Without the named deputy the package still keeps the hawker above his assistant's pay up to a rent of about $2,150 (D.4.1). |
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