Many older Americans are living a desperate, nomadic life
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 “house-less,” 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, -0.65%“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.
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.
DYI: The two books in my headline shows clearly this
houseless but not homeless society was going to be spawned due to the
conversion from old style pensions to 401k type savings plans. The myth book was written in 1995 and the
hoax book in 2002. Showing very clearly
what was going to happen and now is being written about by Jessica Bruder
titled Nomadland.
I
bought years ago the first two books and today as my wife and I head off to
the mall to pick up our new glasses I’ll stop by Barnes and Noble to order her
book. Needless to say having the ability
– income and emotional – to save money present day and future expenses is an
absolute must. It is not a money game
but a flat out war. If you lose no one
gives a damn!
DYI
No comments:
Post a Comment