Serious It's Official! Half the Working Sinkie Pioneers Are Poor!

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

The poverty rate has been rising the working elderly, one study shows. Why do seniors here feel the need to work for long hours and low pay, despite the help schemes available for the needy?


For more than 10 years, 85-year-old Ng Teak Boon has made a living selling ice-cream – but his life hasn’t been quite as sweet. Recently, his housemate has disappeared, and he’s run into problems paying his bills. Read more: Singapore's elderly working poor This is part of CNA Insider's regional series on elderly poverty.




SINGAPORE: They get taken for beggars sometimes as they poke through the trash, by people who exclaim “eiyuh!” in disgust. Impatient drivers honk as the duo push their laden trolleys along the road.

“My brother cannot hear the cars horn,” said the man who asked to be known as ‘Eddie’. “When I tell them he cannot speak or hear, most say sorry. Others curse and say, ‘****, lah, I don’t care’.”

The 63-year-old has long since learned to swallow his pride and let such comments slide, over 20 years of doing what he must to look after his deaf-mute brother, who is 68 and diabetic.

This includes scrounging for odd jobs, in between forays to pick and sell cardboard around their Serangoon one-room rental flat, in any weather.



'Eddie', 63, and his brother who is 68 , deaf-mute and diabetic, both make a living picking and selling cardboard.


“We’ve collected in the rain. I got sick. It's okay when (my brother) falls sick; I cannot fall sick, because I am basically his ears and head, so he’s in trouble,” said Eddie, who pushes a trolley stacked with cardboard higher than his 1.5-metre frame.

A good day is when the brothers collectively make about S$20. That’s with a haul of nearly 200kg, depending on price fluctuations. Said Eddie: “After a long time, our bones start to ache. It really hurts.”

SAVINGS WIPED OUT

Life had looked a lot different, once.

Back then, Singapore, like Eddie, was young and the economy booming (“if you wanted jobs, there was one for you,” as he put it). Earning steady money as a factory worker, construction labourer, driver and printer, he built up a family and a comfortable nest egg over the years.

Then cancer struck, twice – taking from him both his wife and his mother within the space of a year, and wiping out his life savings and most of his Medisave, he said.
Eddie was left to care full-time for his deaf-mute brother, which meant he could no longer hold a steady job. His brother’s life as a cardboard-picker became his own. “No choice. Back then there weren’t all these concessions for the elderly, or Pioneer Generation card; we had only ourselves to rely on.”

As Singapore ages, the number of seniors who work into their silver years is growing too – especially among the lower-income group, for whom retirement is an alien concept.




In recent years they have become more visible as food court cleaners, servers, security guards, tissue-sellers and scrap collectors. Given Singapore’s plethora of help schemes for the needy – such as the Pioneer Generation Package (PGP) and Silver Support Scheme for the old – why do the elderly poor feel the need to work for long hours and often low pay?

Do the jobs that the elderly poor do, as well as society’s safety nets, offer them adequate sense of security and quality of life in their old age?

RELATIVE POVERTY RISING AMONG THE WORKING ELDERLY

In a 2015 paper on elderly poverty in Singapore written for the Tsao Foundation, Assistant Professor Ng Kok Hoe of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy made one surprising observation – while the poverty rate among elderly persons not working had fallen over the years, that for elderly persons in the workforce appeared to have actually increased dramatically.

The poverty rate among the working elderly jumped from 13 per cent in 1995, to 28 per cent in 2005 - to 41 per cent in 2011.



“This should be a strong reminder that work cannot be relied upon as the only, or even the primary, response to income insecurity in old age,” Dr Ng wrote.

“In labour markets where older workers are likely to end up in low-paying and undesirable jobs, work may decrease their quality of life without raising their standard of living.”
According to Manpower Ministry figures, in 2016 about 23 per cent of persons over 65 in the formal workforce were earning less than S$1,000 a month. That’s less than the 36 per cent in 2013, and 57 per cent in 2003, indicating that earnings for elderly workers have been rising.

But inflation and wages in the rest of society have also risen. And Dr Ng’s calculation draws the comparison between the elderly and the general population. It uses 40 per cent of the median population work income as a “convenient poverty line”, and compares that to elderly individuals’ incomes (which, besides work, could include sources such as children and state assistance).




Overall, Dr Ng has estimated that 6 in 10 elderly people in Singapore in 2011 were poor by that measurement.

He acknowledges that what is considered poor “is debatable”, and notes that a project commissioned by the Tsao Foundation is looking into how much elderly households actually need for a decent standard of living in Singapore. (Singapore has no official statistics when it comes to elderly poverty, or poverty for that matter.)

WHY WORK?

“In Singapore, no money how to live?”, is what Mr Ong Hock Soon says if asked why he is working long hours as a hawker’s assistant at the age of 69.

But in the same breath, he’ll tell you that he has turned down offers of social assistance, and would rather be self-reliant and “work until cannot move”. That mentality of independence is something that crops up repeatedly among the working elderly.

Ms Nurasyikin Amir once thought like most people – that seniors should stop going around collecting heavy loads of cardboard. “Like, rest at home, you’re old, retired already,” said the volunteer with the Happy People Helping People Foundation, which assists cardboard collectors like Eddie.

“But what we came to realise is that when they collect boxes, they feel more empowered; they are earning their own money, even though it’s not much, maybe S$2, up to S$10 a day. Who are we to stop them, right?” she said.




Some don’t want to be a burden on their children. Like food-court cleaner Wong Yeow Kee, 85, who works a 3pm to 11pm shift,

I have children, but I like to smoke and drink, so I work to support my habit and enjoy life. I don’t want to ask for their money.
Even when he’d chalked up hefty arrears, Mr Ng Teak Boon, 85, never thought about asking agencies for help. Estranged from his five children, he has been selling ice cream for 20 years from a pushcart, living on roughly S$950 a month from earnings and Silver Support payments.

“I will sell ice cream until I die,” he said. “It’s better to go outside. If you stay at home and watch TV, you will fall sick.”

Read more at http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/...lderly-8824490


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