Upon concluding our final interview, we sprang into action and started to code all 11 interviews we have conducted thus far. A textual analysis was first conducted individually with each person working on up to 3 interviews. We sieved through the transcripts and audio recordings, extracting quotes and phrases which highlighted the concerns that the hawkers had.

 

Subsequently, we coded for the emotional and the affective aspects, looking out for nuances in tone and style of delivery that may carry certain meanings. For example, a number of our respondents said that they do not think the general public despises or takes for granted our hawkers but followed up with examples of Singaporeans preferring to celebrate birthdays or have parties at posher establishments like restaurants. It is also in their tone that we sense a feeling of hopelessness that the hawker centre is resigned to the fate of being a venue of a lower social standing. We also referred to field notes which recorded non-verbal cues that the interviewees exhibited which we felt conveyed certain messages that were key to our interpretation of their concerns as well.

 

We then concluded by accounting for inter-coder reliability in meeting face-to-face and debating about the various ways we coded the interviews we were assigned.

 

After a seemingly endless discussion on the key issues that were present in our interviews, we decided to categorize our hawkers’ concerns under these labels:

• Costs (rent, manpower, ingredients etc.)

• Sustainability (of the hawker trade)

• Working Conditions

• Public Perceptions

• Challenges to Profitability/Low Returns

• Competition

 

Out of these 6 main topics, hawkers were most concerned with the decreasing profitability of running a stall in the hawker centre followed by the (laborious) working conditions and high costs that come with it. This is consistent with our group’s analysis and prior research of the hawker industry. These 3 topics, along with Singaporeans’ disdain of the hawker career, were also the key concerns expressed in young hawker Daniel Goh’s commentary posted on entertainment and lifestyle website inSing.com (Goh, 2014). The owner of the D'Authentic Nasi Lemak stall at the Marine Parade Food Centre, Sulaiman Abu, concurred with Goh on the long working hours of the trade which discouraged young people from taking up the mantle (Feng & Khew, 2015). And just last month, the Mothership.sg website, a popular local online news publisher, ran an article quoting eminent food blogger Dr. Leslie Tay and a Generation Y hawker Douglas Ng on their concerns with the price cap imposed by the management of two new hawker centres as they would further reduce the profitability of the hawker trade on top of rising rental fees which can go up to as high as $4900 a month.

 

Yet, we recognise that isolating these key issues from the other concerns we have extracted is detrimental to our proposition for a feasible solution that will effect social change because there are underlying links between the various aspects of the hardships which hawkers face. The low profitability of the hawker trade is not only a direct result of increasing costs or expenditure but is also advanced by the unwavering social perception(s) of the low monetary value of hawker food. For example, almost all of our hawkers mentioned that if they were to raise their food prices by as little as 50 cents, they were bound to lose customers and even their most supportive fan would make some noise about it. This sentiment was also shared by Dr. Tay who has been “mak[ing] this argument countless of times” that we should start to expect younger hawkers or new entrants to the trade to charge at a higher price as they pay higher rental fees than existing hawkers who have been offered subsidized rates (Tay, 2014).

 

As such, we categorised these issues into economic, social and environmental factors that lead to the marginalization of this group of people and offer solutions based on the appropriate communication-based approach that would lead to social change.

 

Firstly, in dealing with the economic concerns like the rising costs and low returns of running a hawker stall today, we propose the use of community-based participatory research (CBPR) to create authentic dialogue between the various stakeholders in the hawker industry that would best lead to fitting policy changes. Advisory boards, can be arranged at the grassroots level for each hawker centre involving at least a member from the relevant government agency or civil service branch and an industry professional or academic who is well-informed of the hawker trade and policies as well as members of the public and the hawkers themselves. Each advisory board would be regionally based, convene once every quarter and be required to work with other advisory boards to produce an annual report each year that would guide industry stakeholders, policymakers and Parliamentary debates. In this way, we are able to overcome the lack of sufficient hawker representation in the former Hawker Centre Public Consultation Panel convened by the government in late 2011 (Goh, 2014) and provide for a fair and accurate assessment of the sentiments on the ground which policymakers need to hear and be heard by. We hope that, through these CBPR sessions, the authorities will implement policy changes that would level the playing field for all hawkers regardless of age, years of experience or ethnicity and improve their economic situation across the board while hawkers will learn to take advantage of these changes and also heed the authorities’ advice and better understand the rationale behind the various policies.

 

We also want to empower hawkers to highlight the concerns they have regarding their working environment like the working conditions, the lack of or little access to external resources and the hostile barriers to entry for new players through the setting up of a national hawker association. The association would be in-charge of pooling resources together for troubled hawkers and championing the rights of the hawker population through active engagement, extensive research and periodically raising concerns from the ground to the authorities.

 

Another related outcome we want to achieve is to increase the public appreciation of the hawker trade, the hawkers themselves and their glorious fruits of labour - their dishes - by employing the photovoice approach complemented with various social marketing strategies. By giving them the camera and facilitating a visual discourse through the photos, we want to empower our hawkers and educate the public. We hope to make the audience(s) more aware of our hawkers’ perspectives and come to know them beyond the uncle or auntie behind the wok whose relevance to us consumers is to only be our chefs. On the contrary, we hope that, through photovoice, our hawkers come to recognise the creativity inside of them, that they deserve to be heard and that they also have other skills besides cooking or serving people. Ultimately, we aim to champion a better working environment for our hawkers, new and old alike, and influence society to put itself into the shoes of this marginalised group and resolve to make life better for them.

 

It is a widely acknowledged fact that parents today are mostly not supportive if their children decide to be hawkers after finishing their education (cite). This phenomenon is a result of the successful “dumbing down” of the hawker trade as the only career path for the lowly educated through subliminal or peripheral messages sent to the masses by the authorities through the design of the hawker centres and the relevant regulatory framework. For instance, hawker centres were first erected to relocate street hawkers and eradicate illegal hawking which led to them being conceptualised as venues with basic or minimal facilities to support the public’s convenient access to food and hence were built next to wet markets despite the stench and filth. As such, our survey found that most young people correlate hawker centres with low levels of cleanliness despite the truth that all hawker centres carry out regular cleaning and maintenance. In fact, some of the hawkers we interviewed even suggested that the decline in young hawkers these days could be due to their disdain of the hawker centre and the trade as a whole.

 

Through several social marketing strategies, we hope to market ways in which to show appreciation to our hawkers through giving tips, flowers or gifts and even messages of encouragement etc. and persuade our audience(s) to take action immediately. One of these strategies is to hold a “I Love My Hawker” campaign in which advertisements highlighting the worrying trend of people obsessively taking photos of their food but not the chefs behind the food will be run on print, broadcast and online media for a period of 2 to 3 weeks. The advertisements would have a call-to-action, encouraging audiences to visit our group’s blog and participate in an initiative to take photos with their favourite hawkers and submit it on social networking applications like Instagram, along with a line or two about the conversation they had with them. Such an initiative would create new social norms around the activity of dining out at the hawker centres as people are encouraged to engage and interact with the hawkers, hence acknowledging them and giving them the due appreciation. Another strategy we have in mind is to eternalise certain hawker dishes and their heritage via the blog in which we will post inforgraphics about certain hawker dishes and the amount of effort and sacrifices which go into the food. Called “While Stocks Last”, this campaign aims to glorify hawker food and remind audiences of the need to preserve these local delicacies which may die out in future.

 

All in all, although the issues are highly intertwined, we believe that by adapting these 3 approaches to suit our context, we will be able to achieve the outcomes we have drafted. Overlaps would not hamper our efforts but instead lead to increased effectiveness of our strategies as we will tend to achieve more than what we aimed for. Nonetheless, we are open to feedbacks and suggestions so if you have any, do share with us so that we can tweak our solutions to bring about the greatest impact to society and more benefit for our hawkers!

 

References:

 

http://features.insing.com/feature/commentary-the-threats-to-singapore-hawkers/id-242f3101/

 

http://mypaper.sg/top-stories/pundits-whip-ideas-attract-new-hawkers-20150319

 

http://mothership.sg/2015/10/thank-you-policymakers-local-hawker-culture-is-dying-because-of-you-hugs/

 

http://ieatishootipost.sg/fishball-story-handmade-fishballs/