AGEING AND FINANCIAL (IN)ADEQUACY: HOW SENIORS ENTER AND NEGOTIATE TISSUE PEDDLING IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Elderly poverty is a persisting phenomenon in Singapore, and many seniors are forced to remain in the workforce in old age. As both the state and scholarly literature focus on seniors in formal employment, those in the informal economy become overlooked. This thesis delves into said informal economy by studying seniors embarking on the street-level economic activity of tissue peddling. The life course approach was used to analyse how they enter tissue peddling, and the positioning theory was used to study how they negotiate this economic arrangement. The findings show that tissue peddling is often a last resort solution to an unresolvable financial need. Said financial need stems from the inability to (1) participate in the formal economy – often due to unemployability resulting from mobility loss, (2) turn to external financial aid – due to familial estrangement and/or insufficient public assistance, as well as (3) accrue sufficient financial capital over the lifetime to tide them through old age. These factors have both structural and agentic undercurrents, and they eventually propel individuals to turn to tissue peddling, an active income source with low barriers-to-entry. Tissue peddling is a laborious job, however, and many peddlers adopted the coping strategy of reconstruing tissue peddling as a meaningful job rather than a dreadful one. They position tissue peddling in the contexts of their inimical life circumstances, as well as principles and values. In doing so, tissue peddling becomes a means to overcome negative life circumstances, reject pejorative labels of “beggary”, and fight idleness and helplessness.