C.5Work Dynamics Compared
Hawkers work the longest hours of any group, are the oldest (median age 60) and are paid the second least. In 2021 the median (the middle figure: half are above it, half below) full-time hawker working on his own earned about $1,470 a month before tax: below the poorest fifth of employees ($2,200 a month), and below the delivery riders ($1,800) and private-hire drivers ($2,000) whom the Platform Workers Act now protects. Only taxi drivers earned less (MOM, in the Advisory Committee on Platform Workers' report, 2022, Fig. 1.1).
| Dynamic | Hawkers | Benchmark |
|---|---|---|
| Age | Median 59 in 2016 (Hawker Centre 3.0 Committee), about 60 in 2018 (Official Report, 19 Nov 2018), 60 in 2021 and 2024 (MSE, Oct 2021 and Nov 2024); new entrants since 2013, median 46 (NHB and MCCY, 17 Nov 2020); 43 at the seven operator-run centres (2018) | Retirement age 64 and re-employment age 69 from 1 July 2026 |
| Hours | About 13 a day: the 21 hawkers interviewed at four centres "worked 13 hours on average", which we read as a day (Open Government Products, 2025); "often more than 14 hours a day, especially on weekends" (Dr Koh Poh Koon, 13 Nov 2024); 70-hour weeks recur in reporting. No one measures them; the Advisory Committee measured riders' hours (2022) | Employment Act hours limits cover lower-paid employees; hawkers have none |
| Income | About $1,470 a month in 2021: the median profit before tax of full-time hawkers working on their own. · It is read from a chart in the Advisory Committee's report (2022, Fig. 1.1), which cites MOM's Comprehensive Labour Force Survey 2021. Dine-in was restricted that year, and hawkers who employ an assistant are not counted. · MSE puts the typical hawker in the second-poorest tenth of earners (Nov 2024). Reported estimates run from under $2,000 to $4,000 a month net; margins of about 9–15% | Median gross monthly income of full-time employed residents, incl. employer CPF: $5,775 (2025); the poorest fifth of full-time employees, $2,200 (2021; $2,500 with employer CPF) |
| A bad month | The hawker absorbs it: rent, stock and assistants are fixed costs | The employer absorbs it |
| A sick week | The stall closes, or a joint operator or nominee steps in, though a nominee takes 4–6 weeks to approve; NEA may waive rent. Each business day closed costs a typical tendered stall about $372, because fees and the assistant's pay go on, and a rent waiver saves only about $48 of it; $342 at a subsidised stall, $441 at an HDB coffeeshop (our arithmetic) | Paid sick leave |
| Exit | Hand the stall back; no compensation on non-renewal; 6 succession transfers completed by September 2025 | Retirement into CPF LIFE |
| Price of a plate of chicken rice | $3.50 | |
| Profit on that plate | ≈ $0.30 | |
| Median full-time income to match, incl. employer CPF (2025) | $5,775 / month | |
| Plates a day needed to match it, over 30 days (our arithmetic) | ≈ 642 |
The margin is thin enough that volume – and therefore hours – does the work a pay rise does for an employee.
The body is the business. Raw materials take 56% of operating costs and manpower 20%; many hawkers cut the second by working alone. A hawker who cannot stand at the wok has no revenue, no paid leave and no injury claim. An employee's employer shares the risk of illness, and a rider's platform insures his injuries; for the hawker, both fall on the worker, unless he has bought a policy himself.
What the work does to the body
Start with the day. A hawker works about 13 hours, on the usual reading a day, six days a week: some 78 hours a week (our arithmetic), mostly standing, at a wok or a chopping board, in a stall that a failed exhaust can push past 40°C (People's Park Food Centre, July 2023, as reported). None of the science on such a day is new. The WHO and ILO find that working 55 hours a week or more raises the risk of stroke by 35% and of heart disease by 17%, and that long hours killed 745,194 people in 2016 (Pega et al., Environment International, 2021). Across 17 studies of 5,037 restaurant workers, two in three report musculoskeletal pain in a year and half report low-back pain (Makki et al., Public Health in Practice, 2026). Danish men who mostly stand at work are hospitalised for varicose veins at 1.85 times the rate of others (Tüchsen et al., 2000). At three NUS food-court stalls, frying raised fine particles six- to eightfold above background (See et al., 2006), and IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) classes the fumes of high-temperature frying as probably carcinogenic (2010).
Granted, almost none of this was measured on Singapore's hawkers. The nearest local study, of 125 hospital kitchen staff, found those who prepared food injured at more than twice the rate of those who did not, 56% against 22% (Leong et al., 2024). A Singapore study found that cooking fumes raised the risk of lung cancer among smokers, not among non-smokers (Tang et al., 2010). Food services is Singapore's second most injury-prone sector for employees, but MOM's figures come from employers' reports and WICA, which leave the self-employed out (WSH National Statistics 2025). So the honest claim is narrower than a headline: the trade's hazards are well documented elsewhere, and unmeasured here. The livelihood dataset should count pain, days lost and reasons for leaving (C.9.2).
The press, meanwhile, keeps the record the State does not. Kong Kee Mutton Soup at Farrer Park closed in March 2023 after about 35 years; its owners, both 66, said their backs and feet hurt, and "Our fingers will also become numb after using knives for long periods" (Mustsharenews, 22 Mar 2023). Very Lucky Turtle Soup at Berseh Food Centre closed in June 2025, after a doctor told its 65-year-old cook, who had stood about 14 hours a day, that the hours had left his legs with poor circulation (Mothership, 16 Jun 2025). Each case names a part of the body, and almost each ends the same way: no one else could cook the dish.
Why cover is a heritage measure
A closed stall still pays its rent, its fees and its assistant. On the model's typical tendered stall (won at NEA's open tender, usually by the highest bid), each business day lost costs the hawker about $372, and six weeks away about $13,400, more than a third of his year's net income (our arithmetic on the stall of Follow the Plate, D.3). The employee in the next kitchen is paid in full for 14 days' medical leave and 60 in hospital. The hawker gets nothing, so he works through the pain until the pain decides for him. In Japan, the owner's death or poor health caused 85% of the bankruptcies blamed on a lack of successor in the year to March 2026 (Tokyo Shoko Research, 8 Apr 2026); in Singapore no one counts them. A recipe does not retire; a body does. The plan has three answers. Critical-illness cover deals with the risks of long hours and fumes (C.10). Hospital cash pays for the spells in hospital (C.9.1). Only the Relief-Hawker Corps tackles the commonest harm, the slow pain that ends a career, by giving the body days off before it forces them (the Plan, §2.7). On a covered day the hawker's $372 becomes his $40 co-pay. Cover that keeps the stall open while the cook recovers keeps the recipe in the city. That is why the Security Package comes first.