Having been nurtured on a solid middle class philosophy of thrift and hard work - “neither a lender nor a borrower be” – was the favourtie aphorism in our home – I had always viewed pawn shops with some squeamishness and steered clear of them.

Recently, however, curiosity got the better of me and I followed a group of three young women into the narrow confines of the shop. It was crowded with a motley assortment of men and women customers, most looking like well-dressed heart-landers, except for three young women whose main interest seemed to be in looking for gold trinkets on the cheap.

What caught my attention, however, were two women and a man, both apparently trying to pawn valuables. The man had a watch and a gold bracelet, one of the women had three gold chains and both were deep in awkward discussion with some persons across the counter whom I took to be valuers.

Both the customers had the closed and slightly uncomfortable looks of people who were doing something distasteful but necessary. Considering that they were hocking such handsome and obviously new pieces, I guessed they were recently retrenched office workers in need of immediate cash.

But neither held my attention as acutely as the second woman who appeared to be in her late 40s and kept to a corner. She had a tired and timid air about her as if she felt that her offering would be met with scorn by the shopkeeper. She was right. Pushing back a much-used and meager looking gold chain at her, he mumbled something. I heard her ask gently in disbelief: “Only $35 for this?” but glimpsing the quiet despair in her eyes I knew it must have been only rhetorical.

Before I could see the further degradation of the woman’s spirit and dignity, I left the shop quietly. How many times must she have swallowed her pride and gone there? How many valuables – beloved pieces with a history behind each - must she have had to part with to pay her family’s bills? Obviously, she must have been doing this for some time and was now down to her last few pieces, the better ones having long been consigned to the dust heap of joblessness and usury.

How many Singaporeans like her are there I wonder? With the joblessness rate hitting a two-decade high of 5.5 per cent, there must be many like her I asked Ms P. Wong an employee of Teck Hing Pawnshop, a 30-year old pawnshop operator in Geylang.

“Maybe because we only deal in branded watches and diamond jewellery we don’t see many new customers coming in.” According to her, young people don’t usually buy jewelery so they are not likely to have much jewellery to sell anyway.

However, she said, there have been “quite a number of people phoning up and asking if we buy mobile phones and lap-tops, but we tell them no,” she let on.

With Singapore facing the worst recession in 40 years, how are its jobless coping and going to cope? There is no unemployment scheme that Singaporeans can fall back on as the Government has long rejected the notion of a welfare state. It prefers short-term incentives to those in need to avoid building a reliance on state handouts.

The responsibilities have to be shouldered partly by families and partly by the 260-odd private welfare organistions as state support only comes into play once a person’s Central Provident Fund (CPF) money has been exhausted.

Lately, some well-meaning advocates for change – the Economic Review Committee - had suggested that retrenched people be allowed to use their CPF money to pay their bills, a suggestion shot down by the government.

What a pity. The aim of the committee was to help Singaporeans adjust and cope with the disruption from economic restructuring taking place in the country. It would have gone such a long way in putting food on the table for jobless families and saved the dignity of women like the one at the pawnshop that day.

The views of the writer do not neccessarily represent the views of Lycos Asia.

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