Nomadland Read online

  As compensation, some employers pay an hourly wage. One Georgia farm seeks workampers for “daily hands-on training of llamas,” providing an RV spot with hookups in exchange for twenty to twenty-four hours of free labor a week, paying $7.50 an hour after that. Others offer only a version of bed and board—a parking spot that is not necessarily paved but hopefully level and flat, along with hookups for water, electricity, and sewage. (A classified ad for one such wage-less position asked “Can You Drive a Boat? Do You Enjoy It?” and sought a “volunteer” water taxi captain for the Port San Luis Harbor District in California. The job entailed working up to forty hours a week and getting an RV site—but no pay—in return.) And then there is the annual sugar beet harvest. The last week of September, the American Crystal Sugar Company brings hundreds of RV dwellers to Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota. Weather permitting, they work day and night in twelve-hour shifts. In return they get a starting wage of $12 an hour plus overtime, along with the standard parking space.

  There’s no clear count of how many people live nomadically in America. Full-time travelers are a demographer’s nightmare. Statistically they blend in with the rest of the population, since the law requires them to maintain fixed—in other words, fake—addresses. No matter how widely they wander, nomads must be officially “domiciled” somewhere. Your state of residence is where you get vehicles registered and inspected, renew drivers’ licenses, pay taxes, vote, serve on juries, sign up for health insurance (except for those on Medicare), and fulfill a litany of other responsibilities. And living nowhere, it turns out, means you can live anywhere you want, at least on paper. So many folks opt for residency in the places with the fewest hassles—Florida, South Dakota, and Texas, which lack state income taxes, are longtime favorites—and use mail-forwarding services to stay in touch. The rules for becoming a South Dakotan are especially laid-back. Spend one night at a local motel and register with a South Dakota mail forwarding service. Then show both receipts to the state department of public safety and you’re in.

  Despite a lack of hard numbers, anecdotal evidence suggests the ranks of American itinerants started to boom after the housing collapse and have kept growing. “We find since 2008 a lot more people are looking for us. In fact I have a list of people interested in hearing about jobs. I had to cap the list at 25,000 names,” Warren Meyer, the president of Recreation Resource Management, which manages 110 campgrounds and hires some 300 workampers, told an Al Jazeera reporter. “Most folks are couples so that’s really probably like 50,000 people who are applying for the 50 jobs I have,” he added. “In 2008 I used to have to go to these conventions of retirees and try and beg people to work for me.”

  Kampgrounds of America (KOA), a major employer of workampers, hires some 1,500 couples each year for its resorts and franchises across the country, a representative told AARP. Workamper News, a bi-monthly magazine whose website features a popular job-listing service, claims to reach 14,000 members, with more joining all the time.

  Meanwhile, “living in a van, or ‘vandwelling,’ is now fashionable,” proclaimed The New York Times Magazine in late 2011, adding that 1.2 million homes were predicted to be repossessed that year and noting that van sales were up 24 percent.

  Of all the programs seeking workampers, the most aggressive recruiter has been Amazon’s CamperForce. “Jeff Bezos has predicted that, by the year 2020, one out of every four work campers in the United States will have worked for Amazon,” read one slide in a presentation for new hires. To find warm bodies, the company has set up recruiting kiosks at nomad-friendly events—mostly RV shows and rallies—in more than a dozen states across the country. Recruiters wear CamperForce T-shirts and pass out “NOW HIRING” fliers, along with promotional stickers, notepads, paper fans, tubes of lip balm, landscape calendars, and “koozies,” the neoprene sleeves that keep beer cans cold. All the objects bear the CamperForce logo: a black silhouette of an RV in motion, bearing Amazon’s “smile” insignia.

  More recently, that logo and a link to the recruiting website for CamperForce have appeared on large magnetic sunshades, made to cover the windshields of parked RVs. In 2015 these were presented as gifts to a handful of CamperForce workers, who were urged to put them up wherever they roam. Workers are also offered a referral bonus of $125—up from $50 in 2012—for each new hire they sign up.

  CamperForce recruiters hand out promotional items at RV shows around the country.

  CamperForce has also published digital newsletters for prospective employees with tips from veterans of the program, such as the following:

  Donna Bonnett says, “Do not try working in brand new shoes! Be sure to break them in beforehand.”

  Joyce Cooley says, “The most important tip is a positive attitude. We do not need to expect everything to be given to us. We must work for it.”

  Carol Petty says, “The right outlook from the beginning will certainly help. This is a job, not a career.”

  George Nelson says, “Go with the flow and don’t complain because this isn’t our profession. It’s just a seasonal job.”

  Brian Nelson says, “I took the perspective that I was getting PAID TO EXERCISE as a picker. When you have long distances between picks, power walk. You’ll burn more calories and be more productive at the same time.”

  Sharon Scofield says, “Your hands may receive minor cuts, or chafe from box handling. Amazon provides gloves to protect your hands. Buy GOOD hand lotion and massage thoroughly.”

  The newsletters also recommended attractions near Amazon warehouses that workers might enjoy off-hours. “In October, Fernley celebrates the ‘Hard Times Dance,’” one suggestion read. “Attendees come clad in Depression-era and ‘hard times’ apparel.” Another, aimed at workers in Coffeyville, Kansas, said, “There are also nut trees in the parks [and] you can pick up black walnuts, pecans, and hickory nuts for free. One camper couple picked up and sold over one hundred pounds of pecans last year!”

  An Amazon recruiting handout warns CamperForce candidates that they should be ready to lift up to fifty pounds at a time, in an environment where the temperature may sometimes exceed 90 degrees. Newsletters for the program repeat the company’s motivational slogan, “Work hard. Have fun. Make history.” And they emphasize the program’s intangible rewards: “You’ll be surrounded by fellow CamperForce associates who get together to make new friends and reacquaint with old ones, share good food, good stories, and good times around the campfire, or around the table. In some ways, that’s worth more than money!”† In a closed, worker-run Facebook group called Amazon CamperForce Community, one woman talked about losing twenty-five pounds during her three months on the job. Another replied, “It’s easy to lose weight by walking a half marathon every day. Bonus: you’re too tired to eat!” A third worker boasted of walking 547 miles in ten weeks of work. He was later topped by another, who posted a Fitbit log showing 820 miles in twelve-and-a-half weeks.

  I WANTED TO SEE this new kind of company town for myself. When I mentioned that to a former CamperForce recruiter, he suggested the best time to visit would be late October, because “folks wouldn’t be quite so exhausted yet.”

  I took that advice, arriving in Fernley the week before Halloween in 2013. By then, workers had already crammed into lots as far as thirty-five miles away from the Amazon warehouse, including the RV parking area at the Grand Sierra Resort & Casino in Reno. (Linda was among this crowd, staying in the nearby town of Fallon, but I didn’t know it at the time and wouldn’t encounter her until three months later in Arizona.) Many of these mobile home parks had booked up months in advance and had long waiting lists. The most popular—it offered the shortest commute—was the Desert Rose RV Park, a gravel patch bounded by Highway 50 and bisected with high-voltage wires that crackled audibly overhead. There CamperForce workers had set out doormats and patio furniture. They’d hung wind chimes and bird feeders from the cottonwoods and raised flags emblazoned with “AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL” and “IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE.” A
few displayed homemade yard art, which included a cantaloupe-sized flying eyeball mounted on an inverted steering column, with several forks welded to each side for wings. Others had put up Halloween decorations: hay bales, dried cornstalks, a pumpkin covered in pink glitter. And when they weren’t beautifying their own parking spots, they engaged in the small social transactions that were making this place start to feel like a community: forming car pools to save gas money, swapping advice on inexpensive restaurants for a day-off treat. (Their favorite? The Gold Pan Special at the Pioneer Crossing Casino in Fernley: two eggs and two buttermilk pancakes with bacon, sausage, or ham, plus a side of hash browns or home fries, all for only $2.70, factoring in the 10 percent senior discount.)

  I’d long assumed that most RVers were retirees tootling idly around America, sightseeing and enjoying the relaxation they’d earned after decades of employment. RV, after all, stands for “recreational vehicle.” Those happy-go-lucky pensioners still exist, but they’ve been joined by the new nomads. Most of the denizens of the Desert Rose, for example, weren’t thinking about recreation. Newcomers were preoccupied with “work hardening,” an acclimation period of half-day shifts. Earlier arrivals were already straining to keep up with the pace in the warehouse.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever done factory work. I’ve got a whole new respect for it,” Linda Chesser, a former Washington State University academic adviser, told me. She was hanging shirts in the laundry room at the Desert Rose, where bookshelves held a modest lending library and a wildflower meadow was emerging from an unfinished 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. She was sixty-eight and told me she was thankful for ibuprofen. “I take four when I leave for work in the morning and four when I get back at night.” For some campers, ibuprofen wasn’t enough. Karren Chamberlen, a sixty-eight-year-old former bus driver with two hip replacements, told me she’d left CamperForce after five weeks because her knees couldn’t handle the long hours walking on concrete. During a visit to another Amazon encampment—Big Chief RV Park in Coffeyville—I met Kenny Harper, who quit soon after. Later, in an email, he explained that “my left rotator won’t take the job.” Other workers talked about “trigger finger,” a tendon condition that can be brought on by repetitive tasks such as UPC-scanner use. And many of the RVs I entered were stocked like mobile apothecaries, with Icy Hot Pain Relieving Gel, tubs for soaking tired feet, Epsom salts, and bottles of Aleve and Advil. If the workers ran out of pills, that wasn’t a problem—Amazon had wall-mounted dispensers offering free over-the-counter painkillers in the warehouse.

  CamperForce workers Angela and Kenny Harper at Big Chief RV Park in Coffeyville, Kansas.

  “THIS IS A WHOLE BAND of housing refugees!” Bob remembered speculating to his wife, Anita, when they arrived in Fernley to join CamperForce. The Apperleys used to think they would retire to live aboard a sailboat, funding that dream with equity from their three-bedroom house in Beaverton, Oregon. They’d bought the home for $340,000 at the top of the market and put another $20,000 into it. Then the housing bubble burst and its value tumbled to $260,000. Before the crash, they’d been doing alright. Bob worked as an accountant for a timber products firm—he hated that job, but it paid the bills—while Anita was an interior decorator and part-time caregiver. Neither could imagine spending the rest of their lives servicing a loan worth more than the value of their house. So they bought a 2003 Cardinal fifth-wheel trailer and hit the road. “We just walked away,” Anita said. “We told ourselves, ‘We’re not playing this game anymore.’”

  Bob blamed the bad guys on Wall Street. He spoke almost defensively about his decision to abandon the house. He rushed to add that he’d always paid the bills on time and kept good credit. His downfall was putting his faith in the gospel of ever-increasing home prices. “I never had any experience that a house would drop in value,” Bob said, shaking his head. He compared the “slow-dawning reality” of his new life to waking up in The Matrix: learning that the pleasant, predictable world you used to inhabit was a mirage, a lie built to hide a brutal dystopia. “The security most people take comfort in, I’m not convinced that isn’t an illusion,” he added. “When you find out what you believed to be true isn’t true, it’s disorienting. What you believe to be true is so embedded. It takes a radical pounding to let go.” When I met the Apperleys, both were still a few years away from taking Social Security. Bob planned to keep doing seasonal work with CamperForce until he was sixty-five. Anita wasn’t eligible for a warehouse position because she lacked a high school diploma. So she picked up odd jobs from her neighbors. Their encampment, along with others inhabited by CamperForce workers, had developed small-scale economies, run by the stay-at-home partners of warehouse workers. They hawked their services—dog walking, cooking meals, sewing, upholstery repair, painting lessons for beginners—on bulletin boards in the communal laundry rooms.

  The Apperleys weren’t the only foreclosure victims I found in the ranks of Amazon’s CamperForce. I spoke with dozens of workers in Nevada, Kansas, and Kentucky. Tales of money trouble were rampant. Sometimes I felt like I was wandering around post-recession refugee camps, places of last resort where Americans got shipped if the so-called “jobless recovery” had exiled them from the traditional workforce. At other moments, I felt like I was talking to prison inmates. It was tempting to cut through the pleasantries and ask, “What are you in for?”

  Among the people I met, some had their personal savings wiped out by bad investments or saw their 401(k)s evaporate in the 2008 market crash. Some hadn’t been able to create enough of a safety net to withstand otherwise survivable traumas: divorce, illness, injury. Others had been laid off or owned small businesses that folded in the recession. And though workers under fifty were a minority, I met them, too. They described jobs that they’d lost—or had never found to begin with—and problems compounded by student debt and degrees that turned out to have little practical value. Many hoped life on the road would be an escape from an otherwise empty future.

  CamperForce began as an experiment, one that happened to coincide with the housing crash. Amazon’s far-flung warehouses had been struggling for years to staff up enough to meet the demand for Christmas, so they’d tried out various hiring programs and even bused in workers from three to five hours away. Then, in 2008, a temp agency, Express Employment Professionals, brought in a bunch of RVers for the pre-Christmas rush at the company’s warehouse in Coffeyville, Kansas. Pleased with the results, Amazon branded the program with the CamperForce name and logo, expanded it to warehouses in Fernley and Campbellsville, Kentucky, and began hiring for it directly, cutting out the temp agencies. Later managers created small squads of trusted CamperForce veterans—it called them “away teams”—to train workers at facilities that had just opened in Tracy, California; Murfreesboro, Tennessee; and Robbinsville, New Jersey. In early 2017, Amazon advertised the latest round of CamperForce openings at its warehouses in Campbellsville, Murfreesboro, and Haslet and San Marcos, Texas. (The Fernley, Nevada, facility had shut down, replaced by a new location in Reno that did not hire CamperForce employees.)

  Workampers are plug-and-play labor, the epitome of convenience for employers in search of seasonal staffing. They appear where and when they are needed. They bring their own homes, transforming trailer parks into ephemeral company towns that empty out once the jobs are gone. They aren’t around long enough to unionize. On jobs that are physically difficult, many are too tired even to socialize after their shifts.

  They also demand little in the way of benefits or protections. On the contrary, among the more than fifty such laborers I interviewed in my first year of reporting on workampers, most expressed appreciation for whatever semblance of stability their short-term jobs offered. Take fifty-seven-year-old Joanne Johnson, who was dashing upstairs at Amazon’s Campbellsville facility when she tripped and fell, striking her head on a conveyor-belt support bar. She was bandaged up at AmCare—an in-house medical facility—and then rushed to an emergency room. The episode left her
with two black eyes and nine stitches along her hairline. “They let me continue working. They didn’t fire me,” Johnson recalled warmly. And the day after she was injured, a human resources representative visited the RV she shared with her sixty-seven-year-old husband, a former workamper. Johnson, who had promised her employers that she would never run up the stairs again, was thunderstruck: “We thought that was one of the most amazing things in the world that he literally took time away to come to our door to see how we were doing.”

  I wondered why a company like Amazon would welcome older candidates for jobs that seem better suited to younger bodies. “It’s because we’re so dependable,” suggested Johnson. “We know that if you commit to something, you do your best to get that job done. We don’t take days off unless we have to.” (While recuperating from her head wound, Johnson missed only one scheduled workday. It was unpaid.)

  The folks who run CamperForce reiterate the belief that older workers bring a good work ethic. “We’ve had folks in their eighties who do a phenomenal job for us,” said Kelly Calmes, an administrator for the program in Campbellsville, during an online job seminar hosted by Workamper News. “The benefit to our workamping population being, for the most part, a little bit older is that you guys have put in a lifetime of work. You understand what work is. You put your mind to the work, and we know that it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. It’s kind of like The Tortoise and The Hare. We have some of our younger folks who will race through. You guys are pretty methodical—you just kind of work as you go, and work as you go—and at the end of the day, believe it or not, you both cross the finish line at about the same time.”