Seniors Scramble For Income As The Fed Inflates

The Federal Reserve’s decades long program of inflation, as the cure to fix all things wrong with economy, has made retirement a luxury fewer people can afford. It’s not a story that’s well known. That the retail world is being taken over by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon is common knowledge.

The two trends crash together in Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland, a book gushed about by reviewers at The New York Times. Bruder said at the Wisconsin Book Festival, “the economy is a mess,” and goes on to rail against greedy employers who don’t want to pay benefits and fund retirement funds.

Bruder’s book is chalk full of sad stories of layoffs, foreclosures, and lack of family support. At the same time, these nomads, workampers or rubber tramps, are a resilient bunch, who left behind the costs and responsibilities of real estate for “wheelestate” to survive their golden years.

This is where Mr. Bezos comes in. Amazon is a large employer of the workampers. “Incentivized by federal tax credits for employing elderly workers (25 to 40 percent of wages), the company aggressively recruits them, especially during the holiday season,” Parul Sengal writes for The New York TimesThe  “Jeff Bezos has predicted that a quarter of all workampers will pass through his warehouses, working 10 hours or more a day, sorting packages.”

Not having the luxury of financial security and leisure time to play golf and bridge, “workampers ride a national circuit of jobs extending coast to coast and up into Canada, a shadow economy created by hundreds of employers posting classified ads on websites with names like Workers on Wheels and Workamper News,” writes Bruder.

The fact is, employers are eager to hire workampers. “They love retirees because we’re dependable. We’ll show up, work hard, and are basically slave labor,”seventy-seven-year-old David Roderick told the author.