They live in RVs and drive from one low-wage job to another
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By
RICHARDEISENBERG
This article is reprinted by permission
from NextAvenue.org. It is part of a partnership
between Next Avenue and Chasing the Dream, a public media initiative
on poverty and opportunity.
In her powerful new book, “Nomadland,” award-winning journalist Jessica
Bruder reveals the dark, depressing and sometimes physically painful life of a
tribe of men and women in their 50s and 60s who are — as the subtitle says —
“surviving America in the twenty-first century.” Not quite homeless, they are
“houseless,” living in secondhand RVs, trailers and vans and driving from one
location to another to pick up seasonal low-wage jobs, if they can get them,
with little or no benefits.
The “workamper” jobs range from helping
harvest sugar beets to flipping burgers at baseball spring training games to
Amazon’s AMZN, +2.87% “CamperForce,”
seasonal employees who can walk the equivalent of 15 miles a day during
Christmas season pulling items off warehouse shelves and then returning to
frigid campgrounds at night. Living on less than $1,000 a month, in certain
cases, some have no hot showers. As Bruder writes, these are “people who never
imagined being nomads.” Many saw their savings wiped out during the Great
Recession or were foreclosure victims and, writes Bruder, “felt they’d spent
too long losing a rigged game.” Some were laid off from high-paying
professional jobs. Few have chosen this life. Few think they can find a way out
of it. They’re downwardly mobile older Americans in mobile homes.
During her three years
doing research for the book, conducting hundreds of interviews and traversing
15,000 miles, Bruder even tried living the difficult nomad life; she lasted one
workweek. I recently interviewed Bruder to learn more about the lives
in Nomadland and what the future holds for these people:
Next Avenue: How did you come to write “Nomadland?”
Jessica Bruder: It grew out of a
story I wrote for Harper’s in 2014. I had read a story in Mother Jones and it
mentioned a woman working in a warehouse who was living in an RV and said she
couldn’t afford to retire. I went ‘Goodness!’ Call me naive, but when I see an
RV, I assume it’s owned by one of the last of great pensioners enjoying
retirement and going to see the National Parks. I regarded it as a life of
luxury and a neat retirement choice. After all, they call them ‘recreational’ vehicles.
I started doing some
research and learned there was a whole spectrum of thousands of employers
hiring people in similar situations — in oil fields, harvesting sugar beets and
helping out at amusement parks. These are not easy jobs or the kind typically
associated with people in older stages. But nobody had been looking at it in
context of the retirement crisis in the wake of the Great Recession. And a lot
of the recruiting materials for these jobs made them look like summer camps.
Some for Amazon’s CamperForce said if you come, you’ll make friends. It felt so
strange to me, so I started talking to RV’ers outside Amazon warehouses in
Nevada and Kansas. Some lost their savings; some thought they would retire on
the equity in their homes, but their homes dropped in value dramatically, while
the cost of traditional housing kept going up. A lot of them were living hand
to mouth; it was hard for them to save for tomorrow.
What else were the people like who you met in
“Nomadland?”
The people I met on the
road were so creative and resilient and I spent time learning from them.
Following them was the most exciting opportunity I’ve ever had.
Why do you think so many older people are
living and working this way?
I think it has been the
pretty bad economic times. We saw in the 1980s a shift from pensions to
401(k)s; that was a raw deal for workers. These retirement plans were marketed
as an instrument of financial freedom, but they were really transferring risk
from the shoulder of the employers to the backs of the workers.
I met a lot of older
women. The gender wage gap has meant women have lower lifetime earnings then
men; they spend more time out of the workforce doing unpaid labor, raising
families or caring for parents.
Do you have any sense about whether the numbers
of people in “Nomadland” are growing and why?
Anecdotally. Amazon’s CamperForce says it’s
getting more and more applications. And when I track Facebook FB, -1.46% groups of
these people, they’re all exploding. There are probably in the tens of
thousands of people in Nomadland, and that’s being conservative.
Why do Nomads live like this?
We live in a culture
where if your number didn’t come up, you’re a bad person, you’re lazy, you
should be ashamed of yourself. It eats away at people. It makes them more
exploitable.
What are the challenges they face?
I talked to one couple, Barb and Chuck. He
had been head of product development at McDonald’s MCD, -1.47% before
he retired. He lost his nest egg in the 2008 crash and Barb did, too. One time,
Barb and Chuck were standing at the gas station to get $175 worth of gas and
the horror hit them that their account had $6 in it. The gas station gentleman
said ‘Give me your name and driver’s license and if you write a check, I will
wait to cash it.’ He waited two whole weeks before he deposited it.
These jobs can be rough physically, right?
I know someone in his
70s who walked 15 miles on a concrete floor, sometimes for 10 hours. Your feet
can get messed up, you can get repetitive stress injury and a tendon condition.
The Nomads talked to me about soaking their feet in salt baths at night and
being too tired to go out. When I went to the sugar beet harvest, it was 12
hours a day in the cold, shoveling. Oh my God, my body hurt! And I was 37!
Tell me about Amazon’s CamperForce program,
which hires thousands of Nomads.
It began in 2008, within
months after the housing collapse. Amazon contracts with an RV park and pays
the CamperForce to do warehouse work loading and packing and order fulfillment.
From the outside looking in, you’d say: ‘Why would you want older people doing
this? The jobs seem suited to younger bodies.’ But so many times, the
recruiters in the published materials talk about the older people’s work ethic
and the maturity of the workforce and their ‘life experience,’ which is a code
word for ‘Hey, you’re old.’
You write that sometimes the Nomads are
exploited. How?
I filed a Freedom of
Information Act request with the Forest Service and learned that some of their
workers aren’t getting paid for all their hours. They weren’t allowed to
invoice.
Some of the Nomads had to work alongside
robots, such as in the Amazon warehouses. How was that?
The robots were making
them bonkers. This is isolating work and there’s one scene in the book where a
robot kept bringing a woman in her 70s the same thing to count.
What needs to change to prevent people from
having to become Nomads or to help them live better if they are?
For one thing, Amazon
should pay its workers more and give them better working conditions. It’s
laughable that the workers get a 15-minute break when they have to spend it
walking to the break room. It’s completely insane.
Nomads need a voice, but
at the same time, it’s extremely unlikely that they’ll organize for better
working conditions because they’re vulnerable and always on the move.
Richard Eisenberg is the Senior Web Editor
of the Money & Security and Work & Purpose channels of Next Avenue and
Managing Editor for the site. He is the author of “How to Avoid a Mid-Life
Financial Crisis” and has been a personal finance editor at Money, Yahoo, Good
Housekeeping, and CBS MoneyWatch.@richeis315
