Have you heard the term ‘Workamping’? I had not until reading Jessica Bruder’s article, “The End of Retirement”, published in the August, 2014 edition of Harper’s Magazine. If you just look at the graphic it doesn’t seem to be a bad thing, this working and camping concept.
However, according to Bruder, many Americans in their 60’s and 70’s have had to buy RVs to live in and to use to find work (we used to think that RVs were ‘recreational vehicles’, right?). A new ‘tribe’ of aging RV dwellers is now moving across the U.S. seeking work where they can. They call themselves “workampers, travelers, nomads”. However, Bruder states that, “More bluntly, they are geriatric migrant labor, meeting the needs for seasonal work in an increasingly fragmented and temp-driven marketplace.”
Why? Many of these people, with once well-paying jobs, seem to have been the losers from the 2008 economic downturn. As well, people cannot live in retirement based on U.S. Social Security benefits of some $499 a month. These “downwardly mobile Americans” have been dubbed “the Okies of the Great Recession”.
How do they live? Well they park their RVs in camp grounds often tailored to their needs ... free, or for little cost, and they do create their own ‘communities’. The ‘workampers’ migrate across the U.S. following a “national circuit extending from coast to coast and up into Canada”.
What do they do? Low paying seasonal jobs. They are the people that work in the Amazon warehouses shelving goods and filling orders during the peak shopping period prior to Christmas. They are the people who staff U.S National Parks, pick berries, staff tourist destinations and harvest sugar beets.
How are they doing? Not well. Aging bodies do not stand up to 12 hour days of physically demanding jobs. According to Bruder, “many of the RVs I entered were stocked like mobile apothecaries”. She went on to say that “Some geriatric migrants I met already seemed one injury or broken axle away from true homelessness.”
What is their future? Not good. They have few if any benefits or protections. As Bruder questions, “What happens to all these people when they’re too old to scrub campsite toilets or walk ten hours a day in an Amazon warehouse or lift thirty-pound sacks of sugar beets in the cold?”
As mentioned above, Canada is also a destination for these ‘Workampers’. For proof just go to http://roamingrv.com/workamping-opportunities-in-western-canada/ or to http://www.workamper.com/WKN2008_canada/caindex.cfm .
Reading Bruder’s article was a real ‘wake-up’ call for me. I have retired with a good ‘defined benefit pension plan’. How awful for those who do not have such a plan and for the future generations who may never even be able to dream about such a possibility! So I ask, “How can we, as a society, ensure that ‘Workamping’, like food-banks before, do not become a common, accepted part of our Canadian social fabric?
Ann Steadman, Associate