Precarious employment

Precarious employment is the book’s recurring condition of work without dependable income, security, or protection from risk. For many older workampers, seasonal jobs offer a way to keep earning when retirement savings and pensions have fallen short, but the work can be strenuous, temporary, and difficult to reconcile with age, disability, or family responsibilities. The book sets cheerful recruitment language against the bodily demands and uncertain consequences of the jobs themselves.

Retirement without a secure landing

The workers encountered around seasonal jobs are part of a growing population of older Americans who have moved downward economically rather than into a secure retirement. The book contrasts their circumstances with the stability associated with company towns such as Empire, where secure jobs and pensions had once made this kind of late-life precarity seem almost unimaginable. Economist Monique Morrissey describes a reversal in retirement security: younger generations are increasingly less able to retire without a drop in living standards. In 2016, nearly nine million Americans aged sixty-five and older were still employed, 60 percent more than a decade earlier; surveys also suggested that only 17 percent of older Americans expected to stop working entirely in later life.

The historical account explains why continued work is not simply a matter of personal preference. The American retirement system was often described as a three-legged stool of Social Security, private pensions, and savings or investments. The book argues that two of those supports have weakened: the Great Recession destroyed assets for many households, while employers increasingly replaced defined-benefit pensions with 401(k) plans dependent on employee contributions and exposed to the possibility of running dry. The resulting transfer of risk from institutions to families makes precarious work a means of filling gaps in old-age security, not necessarily a chosen extension of an otherwise comfortable career.

David Roderick’s history makes that accumulation of risk concrete. At seventy-seven, he and his wife sold Christmas trees at the San Mateo Event Center while living in their fifteen-year-old Lazy Daze RV. For eight to ten hours a day, six days a week, he carried trees as tall as nine feet and lifted them onto customers’ vehicles. He had once taught chemistry and oceanography at California community colleges, but an earlier divorce had forced him to cash out a sixteen-year pension. The $22,000 he received and split with his first wife would, with the state match, have grown to at least $500,000. His later wife had also lost a substantial financial cushion: a $650,000 annuity from her first marriage disappeared in the 1991 collapse of Executive Life. Their Christmas-tree work thus follows not a single setback but the long reach of past losses into old age.

Recruitment and the promise of seasonal work

At the Quartzsite Sports, Vacation & RV Show, work was advertised alongside RV equipment, health remedies, and services for itinerants. Amazon representatives collected names for Amazon CamperForce; campground concessionaires recruited hosts; and Express Employment Professionals sought laborers for the annual sugar beet harvest. One recruiter offered immediate hiring to anyone willing to complete an application. The setting made seasonal work appear readily available, but the jobs on offer remained temporary and tied to particular places, seasons, and employers.

Adventureland presented another version of this bargain. The Iowa amusement park recruited about three hundred workampers to staff rides, games, and concessions at $7.25 to $7.50 an hour. It encouraged workers to stay in its neighboring mobile-home park for $160 a month between June and September, waiving August and September rent for those who remained through the end of the season. The arrangement linked housing to continued seasonal employment. The park valued older workers’ sociability and upbeat manner, but a former employee later described bad management, difficult public interactions, brutal heat, and coworkers who quit. Inside the park, a clerk who had come for part-time work was instead scheduled full-time because the business was understaffed; after a wage increase, employees were earning $8.50 an hour, still below Walmart’s recently announced $9 rate.

The book also records the tension between the jobs’ recruitment image and their actual limitations. Workamper media and employer messaging often cast the work as a sunny lifestyle, an opportunity for travel, or a welcome change of pace. A column in Workamper News advised unhappy workers to adjust their attitudes and treat the job as a means to an end. The author observes that workers can find meaning and companionship while facing real hardship, but the insistence on positivity can also divert attention from unstable conditions and the reasons people need the work in the first place.

Physical demands, injury, and workplace risk

The sugar beet harvest shows how seasonal employment can make bodily capacity part of the job’s hidden cost. American Crystal Sugar Company depends on itinerant workers for its harvest in the Red River Valley, where the first weeks of October bring a race to lift beets before the ground freezes. At Drayton Yard, workers directed trucks to a piler, shoveled spilled beets back into hoppers, cleared dense mud, and filled sample sacks beneath a chute. The beet pile could eventually reach the length of two Boeing 747s parked end to end. The work was loud and rushed: beet fragments and dirt flew from the conveyor belts, workers handled heavy loads, and a supervisor sounded a horn to hurry cleanup. Clearing the piler required climbing inside the machine and scraping away thick mud within fifteen minutes.

The author eventually left the harvest job after a shift, knowing the experience had confirmed the workers’ accounts rather than merely observing them from outside. Attrition was common: most of the coworkers at the author’s piling station had also quit a few days later, and a worker at another station had broken her wrist. The author’s departure came with relief at having avoided that injury. The scene makes the risk visible not as an abstract possibility but as a consequence of rushed, forceful labor and the pressure to keep the machinery running.

Older workers’ physical vulnerability also appears in Amazon employment. At the Haslet warehouse, an orientation instructor warned a group of thirty-one trainees that the work would involve roughly a thousand squats a day. Most trainees were over sixty, and the warehouse had received more than nine hundred applicants after requesting eight hundred CamperForce workers. It ultimately hired 251, as many as could be accommodated in nearby RV parks; some faced a ninety-minute commute before or after ten-hour shifts. One worker planned to sleep discreetly in Amazon’s parking lot twice a week to save time and fuel. The logistics of getting to the job and finding somewhere to stay therefore formed part of its cost, beyond the physical work itself.

Linda May’s experience links repetitive labor directly to lasting injury. After working a previous Amazon warehouse season, she developed a repetitive-motion injury from using a handheld barcode scanner. A grape-sized lump remained on her right wrist, alongside pain that traveled from her thumb and wrist through her elbow and shoulder to her neck. Even lifting a coffee cup or cooking pan could trigger a jolt. Because the injury had not healed, she could not return to the job she had considered as a source of income. Her case shows how an injury can close off the very employment a worker might otherwise rely on.

The risks are not limited to strain or cumulative injury. At Adventureland, sixty-eight-year-old retired postal carrier and pastor Steve Booher was helping passengers leave the Raging River ride when the conveyor belt started prematurely. With one foot still on a raft, he fell from the loading platform onto the belt and fractured his skull. The park reopened the ride the following day. Two months later, state workplace regulators issued a violation notice calling for safety upgrades and a $4,500 fine. His death sharply contrasts with the park’s emphasis on fun and cheerful work, while showing how grave consequences can accompany a job presented as seasonal recreation.

Work, family, and the shifting of risk

For Linda, employment insecurity intersects with housing, health, and family support. While staying at her daughter Audra and son-in-law Collin’s home in Mission Viejo, she slept on a couch by the front door and felt stranded without her Jeep. The household was already under pressure: Gabbi had a serious, still-mysterious illness before testing positive for Sjogren’s syndrome; Julian managed type 1 diabetes; Audra had arthritis; and Collin’s migraines and vertigo had forced him out of his office job. Linda wanted to return to work as a campground host, but the household’s needs and her own lack of independence made relying on family difficult.

The family’s circumstances deteriorated when Collin lost his short-term disability benefits and they could no longer pay rent. Linda gave them her stored twenty-eight-foot El Dorado motorhome. It was a practical response to impending eviction, but the vehicle had to accommodate two adults, three teenagers, and four dogs. The family sold possessions from the rented house, and two weekends of yard sales raised $1,000. Later, Linda heard that her grandchildren were sleeping in a tent beside the RV; a storm lifted its rain fly and water seeped through the floor, while a vacuum had drawn sand through the fabric and made small holes that they patched with duct tape. The episodes reveal how gaps in employment and income can become housing emergencies, with relatives providing shelter and support when other resources fail.

The book connects these individual situations to gendered differences in economic security. In 2015, more than one in six older women living alone were below the poverty line, and the number of poor elderly women was nearly twice the number of poor elderly men. Women received an average of $341 less per month in Social Security benefits, reflecting lower lifetime payroll contributions; they also more often performed unpaid caregiving and, on average, lived longer, requiring savings to stretch further. Linda had raised children and later cared for her mother, who developed aggressive brain cancer. These responsibilities help explain why low wages and discontinuous work can accumulate into reduced retirement income, while care needs within a family can further constrain the available choices of every household member.

Narrative significance

By following workers from recruitment tables to worksites, the book makes precarious employment legible as a system of linked pressures rather than a collection of isolated bad jobs. The promise of dependable older workers is useful to employers, but the workers’ own security remains uncertain: work may be seasonal, physically punishing, poorly paid, or cut short by injury, unsafe conditions, and lack of housing near the job. Even a nominally cheerful work culture cannot remove those conditions, and a workplace accident can expose their stakes with terrible finality.

The workers’ choices also resist a simple division between freely chosen adventure and involuntary hardship. Some find camaraderie, travel, or pleasure in workamping; at the same time, the need to keep earning, the collapse of retirement supports, and family crises narrow the alternatives. The book’s recurring contrast between recruitment optimism and lived labor keeps both realities in view. Precarious employment is not only a job with an uncertain end date: it is a condition in which the worker and family absorb the economic and bodily risks that secure employment or retirement benefits once helped contain.