Old Labour

It's great that Singapore has initiatives to get old people - okay - the elderly - back into the workplace. There are incentives to hire people over certain ages, there is free training and training subsidies and a whole lot more. Singapore doesn't have social security, but it does require that each working person save a certain amount of money, and the employer contributes, and the government invests it. It seems that it will work well enough for people who are 50s and younger, but I don't know how it works for the older population. You do see old people working a lot here, but the hard part is that they're doing really physical jobs. Many of the older people don't have the education or language skills to work in super sophisticated jobs, but there has to be something better than janitorial work, no?

We have two ladies in our office whom I see everyday - one is at least 75, has three kids, and she has trouble walking. She empties our trashes, vacuums (with one of those big things she has to push all around the office!), has to carry stuff places, and generally works really hard for someone of any age - let alone the fact that she is indeed elderly. The other woman has clearly had a stroke, and possibly something with her trachea - since she has a hole in her neck, and I can't understand most of what she says. She says that she has no family, and she has no money, so she works cleaning our toilets SIX days a week - picking stuff off the ground, etc. She's also super old.

I do think that it's good that these ladies have jobs, but as I sit in my comfy chair at my nice desk everyday - I wish that they had a more comfortable job...

Unrelated, the auntie who cleans up our trash is quite hilarious. She doesn't actually take out our garbage bags each day. She reaches into the bin and takes out the trash with her hands to put it in the bigger bin that she pushes around with her. She has noticed that I eat an apple everyday, right around the time that she comes (right after lunch - it's my dessert). So, each time she comes she asks, "apple already?" If I haven't eaten it yet, she comes back. It made me pretty uncomfortable at first, since she was clearly noticing what was in my garbage, but she doesn't seem to care, and I got over it so now it's more of a joke.

In other news, Kitty just ate a bug. She was playing with it for a while, so I thought it would be spit out at some point to keep playing, but no. She ate it. Yum.