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  Beyond that, Amazon reaps federal tax credits—ranging from 25 to 40 percent of wages—for hiring disadvantaged workers in several categories, including aging recipients of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and anyone on food stamps. Savvy CamperForce members know all about that incentive. “The Work Opportunity Tax Credit is the reason Amazon can take on such a slow, inefficient workforce,” noted one itinerant worker on her blog, Tales from the Rampage. “Since they are getting us off government assistance for almost three months of the year, we are a tax deduction for them.”

  THE PRO-ELDERLY LABOR ATTITUDE isn’t unique to Amazon. During an online recruitment seminar for the annual sugar beet harvest, Scott Lindgren, a managing partner with temporary staffing firm Express Employment Professionals, praised the steadfastness of older RVers.

  “We’ve also found that our workampers have great work ethics and for that we applaud you,” he said. “We know that you’ve worked hard your whole life and we know that we can count on you to get the job done and you’re some of our best workers.”

  David Roderick, a seventy-seven-year-old workamper, agreed. “They love retirees because we’re dependable. We’ll show up, work hard, and are basically slave labor,” he told me, recalling the winter of 2012 when he and his wife, also in her seventies, sold Christmas trees at the San Mateo Event Center in California while living in their fifteen-year-old Lazy Daze RV. His job involved carrying conifers that were up to nine feet tall and boosting them atop customers’ cars and trucks, for eight to ten hours at a time, six days a week. “I love the selling part, but the work behind the scenes of cutting and hauling the trees is a very, very young person’s job. But a number of us were retired,” he said of the team.

  If not for the turquoise CamperForce T-shirt David was wearing when we first met at the Desert Rose RV Park, the white-haired and goateed grandfather wouldn’t have seemed a likely candidate for itinerant labor. After starting his career teaching chemistry and oceanography at California community colleges, he’d launched a pioneering ecotourism company and later worked as a State Department English Language Fellow in Jordan. (David also received offers for subsequent teaching jobs in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Both were rescinded when administrators realized he’d turned seventy, passing regional age cutoffs.)

  But the financial cushion David might have retired on had disappeared. During a divorce much earlier in his life, he had been forced to prematurely cash out his pension from sixteen years of teaching at California community colleges. If left alone, it would have grown to at least $500,000 with the state’s match; at the time, it amounted to $22,000 that had to be split between him and his first wife. When David got married again later, it was to a woman who had also taken a financial hit, losing a $650,000 annuity from her first marriage in the 1991 collapse of Executive Life, which was, at the time, the largest failure in insurance industry history.

  David demonstrated for me the squat-and-reach motions he made hundreds of times a day in the Amazon warehouse. He said he’s lucky because, unlike his wife, he doesn’t get aches and pains. He estimated that, at Amazon, he was making one-fifth of his peak earnings.

  “I mean, I’ve never had any problem finding jobs ever, but the work is at these slave wages,” David said. “This is the new age of retirees.”

  As workers like David told their stories, the Amazon encampments began to seem more and more like microcosms of a national catastrophe. The RV parks were jammed with workers who had fallen a long, long way from the middle-class comforts they had always taken for granted. These were standard-bearers for every economic misadventure to afflict Americans in recent decades. Everyone had a story.

  One of them was Chuck Stout, seventy, who estimated he hiked thirteen miles a day as a warehouse “picker,” pulling products from the shelves to fill orders. “People call it ‘prison’ because you walk single file, you clock in, you go do your thing,” he told me. In a previous life, Chuck had spent forty-five years with the McDonald’s Corporation, where he’d been a white-collar employee, serving as director of product development in the late 1970s for the company’s world headquarters. But Chuck ended up declaring bankruptcy in 2011 after he and his wife, Barbara, a fifty-seven-year-old music teacher, saw $410,000 vaporize in the stock market. They lost their house on the golf course at Heron Pointe, a gated community in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, moving into a 1996 National Seabreeze motor coach they call TC. (On a good day, they explained, “TC” stood for “totally comfortable.” On a bad day, it stood for “tin can.”) Inside was a cross-stitch that says, “Home is where the hug is.” After Amazon, their next job was selling beer and burgers at spring-training games for the Oakland A’s.

  Another one was Phil DePeal, a forty-eight-year-old Desert Storm veteran. “I keep telling myself it’s just two months,” he said. “If I can do the Army, I can do Amazon.” Phil and his wife, Robin, forty-six, had started workamping after the market crashed in 2008 and the bank subsequently foreclosed on their home. Intense competition brought on by rising commodity prices had crushed Phil’s Michigan scrap-metal hauling outfit, We-R-Junk. “Scrap went through the roof,” he said. “Anyone who could put something on top of their car would haul it.” Now they were living in a fifth-wheel trailer. They pulled it with a 1993 gold and maroon Dodge P350 pickup. On the side of the truck was a decal with the words “Easy Money.”

  “That was on there when we bought it,” Phil said.

  MANY OF THE WORKERS I met in the Amazon camps were part of a demographic that in recent years has grown with alarming speed: downwardly mobile older Americans. In the heyday of a place like Empire—the era of a strong middle class, complete with job stability and pensions—their circumstances had been virtually unimaginable.

  Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, spoke with me about the unprecedented nature of this change. “We’re facing the first-ever reversal in retirement security in modern U.S. history,” she explained. “Starting with the younger baby boomers, each successive generation is now doing worse than previous generations in terms of their ability to retire without seeing a drop in living standards.”

  That means no rest for the aging. Nearly nine million Americans sixty-five and older were still employed in 2016, up 60 percent from a decade earlier. Economists expect those numbers—along with the percentage of seniors in the labor force—to keep rising. A recent poll suggests that Americans now fear outliving their assets more than they fear dying. Another survey finds that, although most older Americans still view retirement as “a time of leisure,” only 17 percent anticipate not working at all in their later years.

  THE VERY IDEA OF RETIREMENT is a relatively new invention. For most of human history, people worked until they died or were too infirm to lift a finger, at which point they died pretty fast anyway. In 1795, forward-thinking founding father Thomas Paine penned a pamphlet called “Agrarian Justice” that proposed an annual pension of ten pounds sterling starting at age fifty, which he regarded as a typical life expectancy. Americans ignored him and more than a century passed before the German statesman Otto von Bismarck created the world’s first old-age insurance. Adopted in 1889, Bismarck’s plan rewarded workers who reached their seventieth birthdays with pensions. This move was designed to fend off Marxist agitation—and to do so on the cheap, since few Germans survived past that ripe old age. It also landed Bismarck, a right-wing empire builder nicknamed the Iron Chancellor, in the crosshairs of conservative critics, who accused him of going soft. But he’d been brushing aside their complaints for years. “Call it socialism or whatever you like; it is the same to me,’’ he said to the Reichstag in 1881, at an early debate over state-run insurance.

  The notion of retirement was evangelized in early twentieth-century America by William Osler, a celebrated and outspoken physician who helped found the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Workers peaked at forty, he argued in a 1905 speech, then went downhill until they hit their sixties—at which point, he prankishly sugges
ted, they might as well be chloroformed. These remarks came to be known as the “chloroform speech” and they provoked a national scandal. The New York Times’ editorial board likened his position to that of “savage tribes whose custom it is to knock their elders over the head whenever the juniors find their elders in their own way.” Meanwhile, “Oslerize” enjoyed a brief heyday as a popular verb. (That coinage wasn’t entirely fair, however, since the plan for compulsory euthanasia had been borrowed from Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period, a dystopian tale that was quite possibly that author’s least popular work, selling just 877 copies.)

  The pension advocate Lee Welling Squier expressed a similar sentiment in 1912, in considerably less comic terms:

  After the age of sixty has been reached, the transition from non-dependence to dependence is an easy stage—property gone, friends passed away or removed, relatives become few, ambition collapsed, only a few short years left to live, with death a final and welcome end to it all—such conclusions inevitably sweep the wage-earner from hopeful independent citizen into that of the helpless poor.

  Many industrialized nations followed Germany in adopting some form of old-age insurance. But the United States, land of the rugged individualist, lagged. By the early twentieth century, Americans who grew too old to work had two choices. They could move in with their kids, if they had any. Or they could go to the poorhouse, a dismal institution imported from Great Britain, where life was so wretched that residents—called “inmates”—might actually prefer to be Oslerized. One observer of such a facility in Sandusky, Ohio, described it thus: “Building very old and dilapidated; walls in terrible condition; no screens; swarms of flies everywhere; no comfortable chairs; rooms very dirty; inmates do the work; food very poor. The so-called hospital is a miserable place, more like a prison.” An equally wretched institution appeared in a 1920 report to Colorado’s state board of charities: “Building an old church condemned five years ago as unfit for habitation; walls unsafe and falling in; little protection from the cold; old floors cracked and dirty; miserable beds and bunks; a bedridden inmate with tubercular hips who has been in this bed since September and has not had a bath . . . in another dilapidated room sits a woman in rags, past ninety, over an old stove trying to keep warm.”

  So iconic—and dreaded—was the poorhouse that it was awarded a square in the earliest version of Monopoly. Situated on a corner of the board, this civic institution was the space of last resort for any player who “has not enough money to pay his expenses, and cannot borrow any or cannot sell or mortgage any of his property,” according to the 1904 rules. In later versions, game designers paved over the poorhouse and put up a “free parking” space.

  It took the Great Depression to make retirement into a reality in the United States. There were too many workers, too few jobs, and a consequent sense that the elderly needed to be nudged out of the labor pool. At the same time, older Americans weren’t faring so well. By 1934, more than half lacked the means to support themselves. Some individual states had devised a patchwork of old-age pension systems, but these managed to serve just a fraction of the indigent elderly. Francis Townsend, a California physician who had also farmed hay and managed a failing dry-ice factory, began lobbying for what came to be known as the Townsend Plan: If a worker retired at sixty, the federal government would reward him with a monthly pension of up to $200. In short order, thousands of grassroots “Townsend Clubs” sprung up around the country. It was partly in response to this populist initiative that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Democratic Congress passed the Social Security Act of 1935—which, unlike the Townsend Plan, required future retirees to chip in to a common fund throughout their working lives. Five years later, the first Social Security check was issued to one Ida Mae Fuller, a sixty-five-year-old retired legal secretary in Vermont. It was in the amount of $22.54.

  After the New Deal, economists began referring to America’s retirement-finance model as a “three-legged stool.” This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of those legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less. And since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions that are funded by employers and guarantee a monthly sum in perpetuity with 401(k) plans, which often rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices, 401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism. Translation: 401(k)s are vastly cheaper for companies than pension plans.

  “Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families,” Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker writes in his book The Great Risk Shift. The overarching message: “You are on your own.”

  All of which is to say that Social Security is now the largest single source of income for most Americans sixty-five and older. But it’s woefully inadequate. “Instead of a three-legged stool, we have a pogo stick,” quipped economist Peter Brady of the Investment Company Institute.

  That means barely enough for necessities. Nearly half of middle-class workers may be forced to live on a food budget of as little as $5 a day when they retire, according to Teresa Ghilarducci, an economist and professor at the New School in New York City. “I call it ‘the end of retirement,’” she said in an interview. Many retirees simply can’t survive without some sort of paycheck. Meanwhile, she noted, jobs for older Americans are paying less and becoming ever more physically taxing. She worries we’re returning to the world that Lee Welling Squier described more than a century ago. And any serious discussion of that problem, she added, is complicated by a cultural stigma. “I never talk about this issue in terms of ‘retirement,’” she said. Americans traditionally abhor “the idea that you are mooching or you’re not productive.”

  After all, the very mention of “retirement” risks summoning the stereotype of the “greedy geezer”: a boogeyman conjured by critics of Social Security at the turn of the twenty-first century, foremost among them ex–U.S. Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming. The “greedy geezer” spends his golden years in affluent leisure while draining the lifeblood from younger generations. He’s a geriatric vampire, a septuagenarian version of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen.” Except that she drove a Cadillac, and the caricature Alan Simpson described drives a Lexus. Simpson also famously railed against the “Pink Panthers,” a pro–Social Security lobbying group that does not actually exist; he invented it as a straw man—or straw woman?—to make an argument. When an actual advocacy group, the Older Women’s League, accused him of spewing ageist and sexist vitriol, he dug in deeper, emailing them to say that Social Security has become “like a milk cow with 310 million tits!”

  That email ended with a sarcastic sendoff. It seemed to suggest that the legislator had never set foot in a place like Amazon’s new company towns or met any of the many older Americans who must labor long hours to supplement their meager benefits.

  It read, “Call when you get honest work!”

  * Some of these workampers made national headlines in 2010, when the U.S. Department of Labor claimed their employer, Gate Guard Services LP in Corpus Christi, had misclassified them as independent contractors rather than employees and therefore owed them $6.2 million in back pay. A federal judge later dismissed that order.

  † Not everyone seems to prioritize the touchy- feely incentives, however. “Bottom Line for Workampers at Amazon.com: Money” read the headline of a 2014 CamperForce cover story in Workamper News, which interviewed some of the laborers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Escape Plan

  FACING AN INSURMOUNTABL
E PROBLEM—her low Social Security benefit—Linda did what anyone would: consulted the internet. She came across a website with the following words:

  Maybe you were a gypsy, vagabond or hobo in a past life, but you think you could never afford to live the life of freedom you long for?

  Perhaps you are just sick of the rat race and want to simplify your life.

  We have good news for you, you can, and we are here to show you how!

  Linda had discovered CheapRVLiving.com, the creation of a former Safeway shelf stocker from Alaska named Bob Wells. Imagine an anti-consumerist doctrine preached with the zeal of the prosperity gospel—that was Bob’s message. He evangelized living happily with less. One principle underscored all his writings—the best way to find freedom, he suggested, was by becoming what mainstream society would consider homeless.

  “The key is eliminating the single highest expense most of us have, our housing,” Bob wrote. He urged readers to eschew traditional homes and apartments in favor of what some nomads call “wheel estate”: a van, car, or RV. He noted that there were vandwellers subsisting on $500 a month or less—a sum that made immediate sense to Linda—and drafted a sample budget stretching that pittance across life’s necessities, including allowances for food, car insurance, gas, cell service, and a small emergency fund.

  Bob’s own vandwelling odyssey had started nearly two decades earlier, with considerably less enthusiasm. In 1995 he was struggling through a bitter divorce with his wife of thirteen years, the mother of his two young sons. And he was what he calls a “debt addict,” with $30,000 on maxed-out credit cards. He was getting ready to declare bankruptcy.

  When the time came for Bob to move out of his family’s crowded trailer in Anchorage, he decamped to Wasilla, where years earlier he’d bought a couple of acres with plans to build a house there. So far he only had a foundation and a floor. Undeterred, he stayed in a tent, using the place as a base camp from which he could travel the fifty miles into Anchorage for work.