Jessica Bruder, “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century,” W.W.Norton, 2017, 251 pp.
Lately, I have been reading some books that describe the misery and survival techniques that some in America are subjected through unemployment and under-employment as a result of the 2008 crash, technology replacing labor, and global competition. These books are a twenty-first-century version of Grapes of Wrath. In this current book, author Jessica Bruder joins the desperate older nomadic workers to research and present her findings. My previous reviews of Janesville: The End of Loyalty and Hillbilly Elegy are examples of this genre that I am tagging “hardship” on my blogsite.
This current book, arguably of that same genre, is a bit different as it describes these nomads in RVs as tough survivors who occasionally get some enjoyment from life as they travel from job to job. Amazon employs quite a few as part-timers and even has a program called CamperForce describing the low-cost labor policies for this largely transient older American whose social security is not enough to get by on. The key to their survival is the abandonment of unaffordable housing, whether rented or owned, as well as motels; living in your vehicle is more affordable.
Amazon is one of the largest employers of the workampers — and the most notorious. Incentivized by federal tax credits for employing elderly workers (25 to 40 percent of wages), the company aggressively recruits them, especially during the holiday season. Jeff Bezos has predicted that a quarter of all workampers will pass through his warehouses, working 10 hours or more a day, sorting packages. (Walmart is another).
Most infamously, on a sweltering day in 2011, managers at an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania refused to open the loading doors to cool down the building (they were worried about theft). Instead, Bruder reports, they arranged for paramedics to wait outside, on call, to wheel out workers who became too sick to work. All those sent home, it was later reported, were disciplined for it.
The author travels the routes between seasonal jobs with various Workampers who come from all walks of life: a former professor, a McDonald’s vice president, a minister, a college administrator, and a motorcycle cop, among many others―including a onetime cocktail waitress, Home Depot clerk, and general contractor named Linda May. The author tells a compelling, tale of the American economy as she spends three years investigating―her tale foreshadows the precarious future that may await many as today only 17 percent of Americans imagine they will be able to afford to stop working someday. Tens of thousands are already in this traveling nomadic group.
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