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Philip Leong gets out of bed at 3am every morning to open his food stall in Singapore’s Jurong district. He stands for hours over a sizzling wok, whipping up more than 100 plates of fried vegetarian bee hoon, or vermicelli.
The 68-year-old has been doing this back-breaking work for nearly two decades, yet his life as a hawker was not borne of a particular passion for cooking but rather sheer necessity.
In 2002, Leong lost his job as a senior engineering assistant at Singapore Technologies Engineering when the company restructured.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis had taken a devastating toll on the labour market, along with the dot-com crash and the 9/11 attacks in the United States. The effects lasted well beyond the initial drop in economic growth.
Singapore lost 23,400 jobs in 1998 in its first employment contraction since the mid-80s recession. Between 1998 and 2002, only 102,000 jobs were created – just one-fifth of the 474,800 jobs created during the boom years 1993-97.
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