Phil DePeal

Phil DePeal is a forty-eight-year-old Desert Storm veteran who takes temporary Amazon work while living with his wife, Robin, in a fifth-wheel trailer. His path from running a Michigan scrap-hauling business to workamping gives a concrete form to the downward mobility among older Americans that the book identifies in the Amazon camps: work and mobility have become ways to get by after a home and livelihood are lost.

Identity and Background

Before workamping, Phil ran We-R-Junk, a scrap-metal hauling outfit in Michigan. Rising commodity prices drew intense competition into the business: as Phil described it, scrap had become valuable enough that anyone able to carry something on a car could start hauling. The surge in prices did not save his small operation; the competition it attracted helped crush it.

Phil had served in the Army, an experience he invoked to steady himself against the prospect of Amazon work. He framed the job as a temporary stretch of two months, reasoning that if he could manage the Army, he could manage Amazon. The comparison makes endurance, rather than career advancement, the immediate measure of success.

Loss and Transition

After the market crash in 2008, Phil and Robin began workamping. The bank subsequently foreclosed on their home, turning a response to economic disruption into a life without conventional housing. They now lived in a fifth-wheel trailer, carrying their home with them as they moved between jobs.

The trailer was pulled by a 1993 gold-and-maroon Dodge P350 pickup. Its side bore a decal reading Easy Money, but Phil explained that the words had already been on the truck when they bought it. The accidental slogan sits against the reality of their circumstances: the scrap business had failed, their house was gone, and temporary work had become necessary.

Amazon Work and Significance

At the Amazon camp, Phil’s two-month framing sets a limit on how long he expects to endure the job, while his reference to military service presents persistence as a resource he can draw on. The book places his experience among those of older workers whose downward mobility would have been difficult to imagine in the era of stable employment and pensions. In Phil’s case, the sequence is specific: a business undone by competition, a home lost to foreclosure, and workamping in a trailer as a means of continuing.