What she experienced living on the road was a group that is a 'geriatric migrant labour unit'. 'Now we have two-income families where people are working multiple jobs each and they can barely make it. 'If you went back to even the mid-60s somebody who was working full-time at the minimum wage could support an entire family. 'It's sad because it's really changed over time in the US,' she says. 'We just have a really big problem in this country, in that wages have been flat - we're stuck at a $7.25 federal minimum wage - and the cost of shelter keeps going up, and it's an untenable situation.'īruder says data now shows there are few places in the US left where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at a fair market rent. and I think the numbers have probably gone up since I wrote the book. I would say hundreds of thousands, but it just depends which.

'Estimates super-conservatively were tens of thousands. 'Everybody needs to have a fake address to receive everything from a driver's license to insurance. A large chunk of Bruder's story, touched on in the film, is the gig labour undertaken by these nomads, who take up short posts with places like the massive Amazon warehouses dotted about the country.ĭescribed by Bruder as 'plug and play labour', this working model is symptomatic of wider ills within the American economic system.īruder told RNZ there's no easy way to tell how many people are living in cars, vans and mobile homes in the US.

Book nomadland by jessica bruder