In the first five minutes of NomadlandFrances McDormand tells an official at the camp reception that she is “on the Amazon CamperForce list.” The front desk clerk – who previously couldn’t find the reservation – immediately understands. McDormand is ready to go. She is free to park her van at the camp.
It was a moment that confused and surprised me. Writer / director Chloé Zhao had previously established – in a brilliantly efficient use of the exhibition – that McDormand’s character Fern had lost her home, moved to her van and was working at an Amazon depot. But what I didn’t understand – or perhaps what my brain refused to understand – was that not only did a billion-dollar corporation know that one of its employees was living outside the car, but it also had some kind of system to encourage The. This is certainly not a thing, right?
In fact, Amazon’s CamperForce is very important. It is a fast-growing work program run by the company that is composed entirely of people living on trailers and vans, many of them elderly. Amazon hires these people for the Christmas shopping season, gives them a place to park and provides an electrical connection. Fern looks happy living this life, heating ramen on a hot plate for dinner, then waking up before the sun to scan bar codes at Amazon’s warehouse. We don’t have the details of Fern’s work on the film, but one of her co-workers, Linda May, is a real-life nomad playing a fictional version of herself. May was traced in a 2014 article for Harper’s Magazine – written by Jessica Bruder, whose 2017 book inspired the film – and revealed that she was paid $ 12.25 an hour at CamperForce and worked 10 hours a day on her feet. She was in her 60s, as were many of her co-workers. Some were even older.
May was grateful that he got the job. Fern, who is fictional, also thanks you. “I have to work,” she says to a temporary agent. “I like to work.” You find yourself heartbroken and furious for her. Amazon is providing work for these people, yes. But the company is also clearly paying poorly and overwhelming a desperate – and growing – population of the American workforce.
Fern’s story goes like this: she and her husband spent their lives in a city called Empire, Nevada – a real place – an old mining town that was wiped out by the 2008 economic recession that led to the closure of a United States mine. Gypsum Corporation in 2011. Six months later, the Empire’s postal code was discontinued and became an officially designated ghost town. Fern, now a widow who was forced to leave her home, takes her things to a store, buys a van and moves in with her. This is quite a choice. She refuses a friend’s charity offer to stay at her home. With a little encouragement from her friend Linda May, Fern drives to Arizona to participate in the “Rubber Tramp Rendezvous”, a trailer-dwelling meeting sponsored by Bob Wells, a YouTuber and author who helps people with financial difficulties to live the # vanlife.
The people Fern knows say they love the nomadic lifestyle. But as we learn their background stories, it is clear that many did not have much of a choice. One is a Vietnam veteran who suffers from PTSD. Another worked for corporate America until she saw a friend dying of cancer on HR calls at a hospice. Not everyone is of retirement age, but the vast majority are.
“The workhorse is willing to work to death and then be put in the pasture,” says Wells, also pretending to the crowd. “This is what happens to many of us. If society was throwing us away and sending us donkeys to the pasture, we working horses have to get together to take care of each other ”. Wells teaches you how to find secure parking, how to avoid interactions with the police, and how to dispose of your feces in a bucket.
I’m ashamed to admit that I had no idea of the existence of this subculture until I saw Nomadland. As Wells says, these people have been pushed aside by society and forgotten. Now they are trying to survive in a country that has reversed all its promises. If you work your whole life and spend your whole life putting money in a 401 (k), it is assumed that you can retire. That’s how everyone said it would be. But, as Bruder pointed out in his book, Nomadland: surviving America in the twenty-first century, retirement is no longer an option for an increasing share of Americans, many of whom lost all of their savings in the 2008 Great Recession.
New York Times writer Kyle Buchanan suggested Twitter recently that American Factory would make a great double feature with Nomadland, and I couldn’t agree more. Both films filled me with the same kind of justified and fervent anger. American Factory, the 2019 Oscar-winning Netflix documentary by directors Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar offered a real-life view of how global companies transformed the American dream into the American impossibility. The film follows a former GM factory in Dayton, Ohio, which closed during the recession and reopened in 2016 as a glass factory owned by a Chinese billionaire. Workers lost their stable union jobs and were rehired for much lower wages and far less benefits. Like Fern, it seems unlikely that a comfortable retirement will be in the future.
It is hard not to feel that these people – people like Fern, Linda May, Bob Wells and the workers in Dayton, Ohio – have been abandoned. The recession may be over, but the repercussions for them are irreversible. As we enter another economic crisis, with so many still unemployed after unemployment rates broke records last year, when the pandemic first hit, it’s hard not to think about how many other stories like Fern’s are just beginning. Nomadland it is more than just sad. It’s annoying.
Watch Nomadland on Hulu