Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Workampers and a broken security net


Jessica Bruder website
I love entrepreneurship: people who see a possibility that fills a need and then build a business around it, creating jobs and opportunities for others.

Because of this life-long fascination with entrepreneurship, my ears perked up when I heard a story about a guy who wrote a business plan for a new idea as his wife drove them cross country to their new home on the west coast. It was an outrageous idea made feasible by a growing web of technology combined with financial and transportation systems all geared to deliver convenience in an ever more fast-paced world.

From the beginning, this entrepreneur was a big thinker. Struck by the incredible growth of the internet in the mid 90s, he imagined the largest river on the planet as he set forth to build the largest bookstore in the world: amazon.com. 

To most it made no sense. The very word store conjured up a confined space with shelves, doors and cash registers, and everyone knew bookstores were gathering places filled with low margin products bought with tiny slices of disposable income. 
How could this invisible river of books ever make a profit? For several years, it didn’t, only turning a tiny profit after sales skipped past the billion dollar mark. After that, though, it became the river that flooded the world, changing the way we buy everything and offering shopping convenience that is closing retail malls across America. 


However, behind this tidal wave of instant gratification, 
hairline cracks began to appear.
  • Retail Amazon became the place where you could find anything and have it the next day. Mom and pop stores either went online or went out of business. Thousands of people started their own Amazon stores only to have the company later change the rules leaving them out in the cold.
  • Amazon publishing system opened up the world to writers, giving us a world of often poorly edited books with life-time sales of less than 100 copies, while also devastating the old-world where editors carefully chose, printed and marketed books through bookstores.
  • “Next day ‘FREE’ delivery” depended on super human systems that exacted a toll on mere mortal bodies. Mega warehouses were built along major transportation routes, bringing new jobs to small towns. However, those jobs involved long hours of grueling physical labor at entry-level pay and few benefits. 
 And, that’s where and when 
the second part of this story begins.

One of the books on Amazon’s own digital shelves is Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder. It is one of the books chosen for 2020 by Nevada Reads, a state-wide bookclub, and will be released as a movie later this year.

2008

                          

Most of us remember the time span called 2008, also known as the Great Recession. We talk about that period in hushed tones of lost jobs, foreclosed homes, bankruptcies, lost savings, and financial chaos. For the fortunate ones who managed to hold onto the four key elements of life: jobs-homes-health-marriage, it was “back then,” the past, a survived brush with danger. For others, many others, it was a freefall through the safety net.

Many of those freefallers were seniors … people in their 50s 60s 70s and 80s … who took to the roads in their cars, vans, and rusty RVs. They became a barely visible wave of “houseless” migrant workers reminiscent of the Okies of the 30s, often with only a minimal Social Security check standing between them and total destitution and homelessness.
From a review By Timothy R. Smith, Special To The Washington Post
Seventeen years into the 21st century, the news for the middle class is bleak. As one expert puts it in the book, the “three-legged stool” of retirement security — Social Security, private pensions and personal savings — has given way to “a pogo stick,” with Social Security as the single “wobbly” leg. As the election made clear, the erosion of factory work is taking its toll on many Americans. These days, many decent jobs are in cities with absurdly high rents.
Nomadland tells the story of this largely invisible segment of our society … too poor for standard housing … too proud to be homeless. They have become “workampers” following the call of seasonal jobs: park camp hosts, oil fields, amusement parks, sugar beet fields, or, coming back to our story, the warehouse meccas of next day delivery.
Amazon has a marketing outreach to the world of workampers called:



It’s website invites “enthusiastic RV’ers" to choose from seasonal assignments involving "picking, packing, stowing, and receiving.” CamperForce advertises “the chance to build lasting relationships with your coworkers” although the micro-managed schedule involves walking up to 15 miles a day and, as one person in the book said, “about a thousand squats a day.” All for $11 - !2 per hour (as of 2017).

Gradually, as I read this book, it seemed as if the workamper day could be described as: Arrive. Take Tylenol. Walk-bend-squat for 12 hours minus two 15-minute breaks and 30 minutes for lunch. Go home. Take Tylenol. Fall into bed. Repeat. I’m not sure where they find time to build "lasting relationships."

The majority of workampers are women who typically have significantly lower Social Security checks because of motherhood and the gender pay gap. The main character in Nomadland is Linda May, at the time, a 64-year-old grandmother with a history of interesting but lower paid jobs and a SS check in the neighborhood of $600. She is living in a tiny trailer she calls “Squeeze Inn.” As her children were having their own problems maintaining standard housing and she didn’t want to further burden them, she set out on the hard road of being a migrant workamper. Her first tour with Amazon left her with a wrist stress injury from hours of using a hand scanner.

Three years and many seasonal gigs later, Linda still has a dream: she wants to build her own, self-contained earthship in the desert. As the book ends, she has found her piece of dirt and, using her savings from her last tour at Amazon, she has started clearing the land. However, the “check engine” light is showing on her Jeep.

Nomadland is a distressing book, but it is also a book about the creativity and resilience of the human spirit. It was compelling to me on many levels. Two of the seasonal job sites mentioned were places I identified with … one close to Reno where I am now and one in Coffeyville, Kansas, where I grew up.

It also sparked memories of my own 2008 when the work I was doing as a consultant in the field of innovation suddenly disappeared as companies scrambled to survive. Around the same time, my husband died and the loss of his income threw me into the financial abyss. Since then, I’ve had a series of downsizings, some relatively optional but all focused on making ends meet in a more and more difficult housing market.

However, I’m one of the lucky ones. I've wound up in a stable and affordable micro home with a doable SS income. I keep thinking, though, about Linda May and the other women I met through Nomadland, women who live in a tiny space, subject to freezing temperatures (or blazing heat), stretching a budget that barely covers food, walking for long hours on the concrete floors of an Amazon warehouse, or cleaning campground toilets, or bent over picking strawberries. My heart goes out to them.

This book made my recognize my own anxiety and fears, as well as theirs. Fear that comes with living in an aging body and the constant possibility of financial disaster in a society whose safety net has already been broken. For me, all of this is an occasional worry; for them, it is every day, as close as a “check engine” light, a wrist injury, or an empty cupboard before the next check.

There are no villains in this story. Since the book came out, Amazon has raised its minimum wage to $15/hour. Right now, it needs its workampers. However, it also has over 200,000 warehouse robots. Will they eliminate this “opportunity” for seasonal workers?

The current administration is talking about reducing Social Security. For many of us that might mean tightening the belt a bit. For workampers, it could be a death knell ... literally. 

*****

Interview with author: The Rough Lives Of Older Americans In ‘Nomadland'


Book reviews:

https://thenewswheel.com/book

https://www.denverpost.com/2017/10/18/nomadland-

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book

/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/

Monday, February 17, 2020

Love Letters to my life #20: Grow where you're planted


Follow Your Own Path
by Joyce Wycoff

(We know the day we were born, but most of us do not know the day we will die. This love letter to my life is written on the day I've designated as my death day, the 17th of every month, and reminds me to be grateful for my incredible life.) 

Consistency is not an innate trait for me, so I find myself surprised that this is the 20th monthly Love Letter to my life. That thought prompted me to walk back through my journey as documented by these letters. 

I generally ponder my next letter for a few days,
trying to catch the thought that has the most heat. Fragments for this letter have been stirring around in the Reno winds but nothing was sticking … until I reread Love Letter #9: What Am I Supposed To Do? which focused on the dark side of Mexico. 

Every thing, every person, every country has a shadow. However, Mexico’s shadow is a little more visible than some. For expats, Mexico is mostly a safe country, some say even safer than the US with its all-too-frequent mass shootings. However, for Mexicans, especially poor Mexicans, and most especially, poor, indigenous Mexicans, life is lived on the edge of poverty and violence. 

Corruption is woven into the fabric of daily life of Mexico. Disappeared is not a word used for lost keys or missing documents. It’s a gaping, black hole of tears where children, loved ones, and hopes for the future disappear without closure or certainty.

Mexicans celebrate life and death frequently and with great exuberance. They hold family close as the only completely trusted bond. We talk about living in the moment and savoring life; they actually live that way because the real possibility of death and persecution walks beside them every day. 
Mural from Cherán
One of my favorite stories from Mexico is about the town of Cherán. Told more fully on México Stories, it is basically about a town where kidnappings, extortion, murders, and illegal logging of the local forest--the lifeblood of the community--were part of daily life, until one day Cherán took back its power and kicked out the cartels and corrupt politicians. Today, to visit the town, you have to go through an armed checkpoint and declare your reasons for entering Cherán. 

One of the reasons I fell in love with the story was because the change happened when a posse of old women, armed with sticks and brooms, attacked a cartel truck and kidnapped the driver who was stealing their sacred forest lumber. Out of this rebellion came a democratic process of self-government that has been successful for almost a decade.

When I went there with two guides to take pictures of some of the amazing murals in the town, the spirit and courage of the town made me weep. It hasn’t been easy, but they have been so successful that the Mexican government has now recognized Cherán and several other indigenous towns as legal, self-governing communities.
People leaving tributes to the 43 students
Rereading this and the story from 2014 when 43 students were “disappeared” from a small town in the Mexican state of Guerrero, gave me a clue as to why I felt so called to return to the US. I thought it was a sudden decision, but now I understand that it had been festering for over a year. 

The visit to Cherán triggered thoughts and feelings about what is happening here in my country. I thought my move was about being close to family, and it was, but also, it sprang from a desire to come home and be part of the solution to our present crisis.

Being in Mexico reminded me of how privileged I’ve been to grow up and live in a democracy where the rule of law was the norm. We have never been a perfect country. Nor have we ever reached our vision of what a country could be. However, we have declared our aspiration to a vision of liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness.

As that aspiration has become severely challenged, I felt like I needed to be here, doing my small part to help return us to a more perfect union. Mexico was my teacher: it is an amazingly beautiful country with wonderful people being strangled by corruption. It helped me understand how fragile our systems are in the face of greed for money and power. 

Mexico showed me a possible future story that I don’t think any of us want for our children and grandchildren. Recently the Mexican government reported almost 62,000 people “missing” since 2006. It's hardly comprehensible that the unofficial reports are even higher. 

Corruption is a cancer that kills people, institutions, and countries.

Cancer is also a hidden disease that grows beneath the surface until it reaches a mass large enough to disrupt everything. It’s easy to not see its beginnings and to ignore the early signs. However, once seen, it can no longer be ignored as it will eventually be lethal.

Mexico helped me see the early signs of cancer in our political systems; now I can no longer look away. My job, as I see it, is to help others see these signs so we can treat the disease. It’s not a job I wanted or even feel prepared for. 

Lake Tahoe rather than June Lake
I once received a message while kayaking on June Lake in the Eastern Sierra. Across the peaceful blue water was a dusty green and twisted juniper. The message that came was: Grow where you’re planted!
 
This is where I am … trying to grow where I am in this strange and frightening times of the United States where competing forces of good and evil battle for the future. I think I’m on the right side. I just hope I have the strength and courage to stand up for the vision of this country and our people.
About the image: Follow Your Own Path
Focusing on the ugliness of current politics depletes me and leaves me feeling depressed. One of the few things that helps is art. I've started reworking some older pieces of art in hopes of getting them into a portfolio book. 
I've always been fond of this piece because it represents so many pieces and places of my past ... a garden arbor in a Minneapolis park, a bright painted sidewalk in Coronado, California, a sunset from the Sierra foothills, and a rooster from Mexico who has insisted on being in so many paintings. 
Even though I don't know what's behind the door at the end of the path, I know it's where I'm going ... that it is my path.