Campbellsville, Kentucky

Campbellsville, Kentucky, appears as a seasonal work destination where Amazon warehouse labor and life on wheels meet. For workers who arrive in trailers, vans, and other small homes, the town offers a temporary wage and a place to park, but not the security of permanent employment. Its warehouse and nearby mobile-home parks form a short-lived company town, populated by people whose ability to stay depends on a job that will soon end.

Warehouse and Seasonal Work

Amazon expanded its CamperForce program to a warehouse in Campbellsville after first testing the use of RV-dwelling seasonal workers in Coffeyville, Kansas. The program recruits mobile residents for the surge in orders before Christmas, joining them with other temporary employees at facilities Amazon calls fulfillment centers. In early 2017, Campbellsville remained among the warehouses advertised for CamperForce openings.

For one sixty-six-year-old former general contractor, the arrangement connected an overnight warehouse shift to a very small trailer in a mobile-home park that contracted with Amazon to house nomadic workers. She stocked merchandise by pushing a wheeled cart across the concrete floor, trying to scan each item correctly and keep her job. After work, she returned to the trailer. The contrast between the repetitive demands of the warehouse and the compact home waiting nearby gives Campbellsville’s seasonal economy its particular shape: the employer draws labor into town, while the workers bring their own shelter.

The program’s place in a larger labor system is apparent in its timing. The jobs answer a predictable holiday shipping rush, not a lasting local need for these workers. Amazon began CamperForce after years of difficulty staffing its warehouses for Christmas. In 2008, a temp agency brought RV residents to the Coffeyville facility; Amazon, pleased with the results, adopted the program’s name, expanded it to Campbellsville and other warehouses, and later hired workers directly rather than relying on temp agencies. In this model, the labor force travels to the warehouse when demand rises and disperses when the season passes.

A Temporary Community on Wheels

Campbellsville is described as one of the places where an itinerant workforce gathers for that seasonal cycle. Workers came from far away and submitted to background checks and drug tests for jobs paying a starting wage of $11.50 an hour plus overtime. Many were in their sixties or seventies, at or beyond the age usually associated with retirement. Their RVs, trailers, and vans were not necessarily equipped for life in subzero temperatures, yet the workers planned to remain through early winter.

The mobile-home parks around the work site supplied a practical answer to one of the central problems of mobile employment: where to live while earning the wage. The park described alongside the warehouse was not simply a nearby residential backdrop; it contracted with Amazon to accommodate nomadic employees. Like the other temporary labor settlements created by this arrangement, it could fill with workers during the busy season and empty when the jobs were over. The town’s seasonal population thus depended on two linked forms of access, a place to work and a place to stop.

That dependence sits within a broader challenge for people who live nomadically. They must maintain a fixed official domicile for matters such as vehicle registration, licenses, taxes, voting, and insurance, even while moving from job to job. Campbellsville offers a temporary point in that movement rather than a permanent home: workers can reside there for the warehouse season, but the work itself does not resolve the underlying precarity of having no conventional, stable housing.

Linda May’s Campbellsville Assignment

Linda May’s journey to Campbellsville makes the seasonal circuit personal. In the summer, after plans to visit her land in Arizona changed, she and Gary were assigned an August 1 start at the Campbellsville warehouse. Their CamperForce contingent was expected to grow to more than five hundred workers. They planned to cross the country slowly, avoiding the hottest part of the day as they traveled, before spending the coming months at the job.

The assignment had a purpose beyond earning the seasonal wage: Linda wanted to save money to begin building a home. She was not arriving as a carefree tourist, but as a worker trying to convert temporary employment into a longer-term possibility. The distance between that aim and the conditions of the job remained stark. When Linda later wrote from Amazon, she said that looking at photographs of her land helped her endure work she disliked; she was counting down the remaining weeks until she could leave.

When her seasonal job ended, Linda started west alone, towing the Squeeze Inn behind her Jeep. Gary stayed behind to work longer. Campbellsville was therefore both a destination and a point of departure: the warehouse’s calendar brought Linda east for a concentrated stretch of paid labor, then its end released her back onto the road, toward Taos and the land near Douglas, Arizona, that she hoped to make her future home.

Work, Risk, and the Book’s Perspective

The account places Campbellsville within an economy that values older workers for reliability while offering them temporary positions with limited security. CamperForce administrators praised older employees’ steadiness and experience, portraying work as a marathon in which methodical effort could match youthful speed. That favorable view did not remove the physical demands of warehouse labor or change its short-term character; it explained why the program welcomed older workers even as they faced difficult shifts.

An incident involving Joanne Johnson, a fifty-seven-year-old worker at the Campbellsville facility, reveals how modest acts of attention could matter in this setting. After she fell at work and received medical care, she was allowed to continue working. The following day, a human-resources representative visited the RV she shared with her husband to see how she was doing. Johnson appreciated the visit and the fact that she had not been dismissed. Her response conveys both the vulnerability of the workers and how even limited reassurance could feel significant when continued employment was uncertain.

Campbellsville also belongs to the book’s shift from brief, upbeat accounts of workamping to a longer, closer examination of it. The author reports that early media stories often emphasized travel and friendship while passing over the economic pressure that had driven people to remake their lives. After months of reporting across five states, including time spent among nomads, the author sought to understand how hardship and optimism could coexist. The warehouse town provides a concrete setting for that tension: workers accepted demanding seasonal work and endured its constraints, while pursuing the wages, companionship, or future plans that made the journey worthwhile.