Field of Vision - CamperForce 

The workcamping jobs that don't pay a wage are illegal. For-profit companies are not allowed to pay less than minimum wage. Also, if you took Social Security at 63, you locked in a reduction in benefits of at least 23-25%. If you've been receiving benefits for less than a year, you can file form SSA-521, but the downside is that you have to pay back what you received. Another option is to suspend benefits between full retirement age, probably 66 years and 6 or 8 months, until you are 70 to get the 8% bump for deferring hte benefit that will undo most of the reduction that you took.

What's your point?

Beat me to it. McDonald's stock dropped from $40 to $12 around 2004 but bounced back in 2007 when this was made. Google it. In April 2021 it's $233. This guy should be a millionaire now. There's a whole lot missing from this story.

@@DarkSaltedCaramel The point is that his story is misleading, at best. His money didn't just disappear. He probably panicked and sold at the low, which was a very unwise thing to do.

@@jshepard152 If that was the case, it was unwise, but I don't see how that would change the situation. Being unkind and judgmental is not necessary. He's already well aware of his financial mistakes. He's living it them day. From the remarks, lots of people are taking delight in his misfortune. How sad. 😔

@@DarkSaltedCaramel I don't take delight in anyone's misfortune. But the film maker is creating a narrative, and that part doesn't add up. You can't present something that doesn't make sense and expect no one to notice.

At this rate, you’ll be lucky if you’ll have a job until the day you die, if you’re not replaced by self-driving trucks that is.

My friend is going on 81, still driving 5 days a week cant afford to retire

@@Russsir You actually couldn't be more wrong. You should figure out why.

Peasants will do as they're told

We all lost some amount in 2008 but not everything. You also would have thought with 400K in stock you might have considered paying off your home so you wouldn't face foreclosure.

Not realistic to be able to fully retire in your 60’s with $350,000 .

Exactly.

How'd that work out for Cuba and Venezuela? Right.

@@jshepard152 Lets make America great again and bring back that 90% plus top marginal tax rate. Sound good? You must of lived through the 80s and don't know any other American history. 80sBrain. AA brain is a terrible thing to waste. READ

​@@jshepard152 Venezuela did not nationalize anything really, since their strategy was to overthrow capitalism in a democratic and a stagist way. Such strategy, of course, will always fail, because the oppressors will always get help from the USA to stop the growth of trust in socialism by forcing it to fail. (Hence, the sanctions and the coup attempt last year funded by the USA...) In the case of Cuba, they are doing really fine actually. The difficulties in their lives do not stem from socialism but from the USA embargo.

Of course, the market will drop but the trick is knowing when, some have been predicting a crash for years, -and years

The work may not be that hard, but the rate at which items have to be picked or stowed makes it difficult.

@@themadlibrarian2933 I agree. people are missing this point. there are articles out there to read that give better detail on this

It’s not hard at all . . . for the first hour or two. You work 12 hours though. And your reward for making your quota is a higher quota. Inevitably, when you can’t consistently meet the ever-rising quota anymore you get “churned and burned” and replaced with a new person who, if you’ve lasted a year or two, has a starting hourly pay rate that is slightly less than yours. That’s all the incentive Amazon needs to fire you.

@@pauls.7530 most fulfillment centers try to find a reason to fire you before your first year is up.

Slavery was outlawed some time ago. If they don't like working for Amazon they're free to leave.

It's probably $15 now. If you are unemployed in many Reoublican--governed states, they are about to stop accepting the $300/week federal enahncement to unemployment insurance in an effort to force people back to work, yet they oppose an increase in the minimum wage.

Agreed. Without this Amazon opportunity they would literally be living with their children or renting a small apartment and working another low paying job. This is what happens when you don't save and then lose everything with ill placed investments.

Fairly paid? Walking a concrete floor 10 hrs a day. No benefits because you’re an “independent contractor”? 71 yrs old? Get injured on the job? Move over, someone else will take your place and you get nada while you recover. Work til you die. That’s the american way.

@@jazzis4u1 No one came to his home and forced him to work for Amazon at 71 years old. He went to them and applied for a job, received an offer, and accepted it. How is his age Amazon's fault, exactly? Free choice is such a hard concept for socialists, though. Socialism runs on coercion and control.

I'm not an Obama fan but what you said is not based on any facts, it all happened in Bush's last year (2008) and Obama inherited a horrific situation which he didn't make any better.

you complete moronic idiot.....the crash had nothing whatsoever to do with Obama....unbelievable stupidity...the entire mess was set up and happened during the Bush administration....you cannot possibly be that stupid and ignorant.....

3rd to note you have your facts completely backwards. Do a little research please.

Educate yourself, the market crash happened under Bush. Same is going to happen in 2021. Hope you are prepared sir

@@davidbarton5587 Very late to the party here, but yes. Amazing how some want to rewrite history, and not ancient history, but very recent events, to fit their own narrative. Take care.

I used to believe thus -- was staunch fundamentalist, even activist. But most of the time what you've just said is a recipe for socio-political passivity. These politicians and other plutocrats are eating us alive. They're contemptuous of us and wrecking our way of life in every possible way e.g. thru their "charitable" giving. I'd like to remind everybody that buying from Amazon is like sending direct contributions to the "new" world order. Whatever you want can usually be found elsewhere.

No, the Federal Reserve blew up a bubble and lost all of their money. The people who should be thankful are all of the overpaid government workers and BS desk people not having to compete with third-world labor. It's not the low end that's underpaid but the desk jobs that are massively overpaid. They're causing all of the inflation in the standard of living. Productivity growth has fallen off a cliff since the 70s, so the rise in education and technology did nothing for overall growth (many academic studies agree), especially when you count the prior unpaid work of women, undercounted work hours since computers, NDP (depreciation) and a deflator intentionally understated by geometric weighting, hedonics, OER; no health insurance, taxes, assets; and no weighting by income class. It's all Pollyanna creep. Paper use is up 126% in the last 20 years. Innovation my ass. Some banner ads and an online Sears catalog. Big deal. There is too much wage growth in the professional classes, especially when compared to world wages or productivity growth. Healthcare is eating a fifth of the economy and it's not even that predictive of life expectancy compared to other causes. The wage share of compensation keeps declining. Inflation!

This is from the book The Secret Life of Groceries. Trucking used to be a middle-class job but just look at all of the parasitic subtractions. Over the last ten years industry turnover in trucking has ranged between 95 to 112 percent. Another Hundred-Dollar Workweek While we wait, we try to calculate what she might make for the load. We started at Alamance Foods, outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, as spare a cement loading dock as exists in America. Two Mexican lumpers scooted pallets of something labeled DAIRY into our depths. From there, Lynne scrawled her signature on a clipboard, the lumpers pulled down the back door, slapped us goodbye on the proverbial rump, and Lynne drove off. We had 1,050 miles to go and three stops to make at different distribution centers. For this Lynne gets $1,231 gross or $1.16 per mile, which Lynne tells me is pretty decent for a brokered load. On top of this, the shipper Alamance adds in a $368.50 fuel surcharge, a dollop extra to pay for fuel, her single greatest cost by a wide margin. It all sounds fairly good for two to three days of work. But that is the lure. Now comes the hook. First, a blizzard of deductions: 28 percent of the gross and 10 percent of the fuel is snatched off the top by Cargill for the privilege of driving in their fleet. Then there is a $300 weekly payment for leasing the truck she drives. There is the $300 she has to pay for the week prior, when work was slow but her truck payment was still due. Then there are the lumper fees, heavy-usage taxes, costs for various federally mandated fuel additives, and a mandatory cleaning service after every load, where a dude with a jetpack-like device sprays down the inside of her trailer no matter how clean or dirty it is. So without any other expenses we are below $500 for the entire trip. From there reality continues to intercede. The fuel surcharge almost never covers her actual expense. The truck is supposed to be able to make 6.0 miles per gallon when fully loaded. But we never break 4.5 miles per gallon the entire time I’m riding. This 4.5 mpg is also exclusively driving time. It doesn’t count the quarter tank Lynne estimates she loses when we idle overnight. That quarter tank, by the way, is not the quarter tank of your Honda sedan. Lynne’s Peterbilt has two tanks on each side, both massive: 120 gallons on the driver’s side, 150 gallons on the passenger side. Not to mention a 50-gallon refrigerator tank that keeps our veggies crisp and that lasts only twenty-four hours when Lynne is hauling a load. Then there are the fixed costs that aren’t taken out of this particular load, but need to be accounted for somehow. Lynne pays taxes per mile, per state, and needs an accountant to handle the complexity of that, or at least the trucking company who issues her check demands that she use one. They also demand that she retain their lawyer to handle billing disputes. Then there is insurance, also demanded by the carrier without the opportunity to shop around. Then maintenance on her truck, which when you drive twelve thousand miles a month is a whole different ball of wax than regular car maintenance. Then an escrow account called her “security,” to which-again-she is contractually obligated to contribute, which is maintained by the trucking company, held entirely at their discretion, and that serves as a backstop should she ever throw up her arms and decide she wants to walk away from her lease-to-own agreement. Finally there are a host of tiny fees for administrative work, for mapping devices, “mobile communication terminals,” some of which she can’t completely explain even as they bleed her paycheck. Finally there are the inherent risks. Which as an owner-operator Lynne has assumed entirely on behalf of her trucking company. The week before I joined her, while she dozed at a truck stop, the driver next to her crunched into her. Lynne awoke to the jolt and scrambled out of her bunk only to watch as the driver fled the lot. She guesses he was a rookie and his whole career was on the line-one early crash and you’re out. But regardless of his identity, she was stuck with an insurance claim. I bring this up because that ever-diminishing sum we calculated Lynne would make for the load consisted of her earnings before beginning the trip. The open road is unpredictable in almost every way except one: the longer you are on it, the more certain something costly will happen. It takes a shift in mind-set, one the rookie driver almost never makes, but this is not about bad luck. A hit-and-run might be rare, but it is just one risk among thousands-trailer brakes failing, tires blowing, reefer line freezing-that collectively become inevitable. In this case, the damage was exclusively to her fairing-the plastic paneling around the undercarriage-the best possible outcome. It was both superficial and inexpensive. And yet, despite her insurance coverage, the thousand-dollar deductible on her policy left her liable for the entire amount. “If I need a repair done, and I actually have the money, I just pay for it,” she says. “But that is never the case. Instead I gotta get approval, then I gotta get a loan, then they charge extra fees for the loan, and then I have to use their garage to get it fixed.” Worst of all, every time there is a repair, Lynne sits. No loads, no money coming in. And suddenly a tiny incident takes her from a marginal place to ruin. - To drill in to one small but telling detail of these deductions: Lynne currently rides for Cargill because she lacks what is known as an authority. If she had one, she could deal with a broker on her own. She could negotiate rates that are higher, and she wouldn’t have to sacrifice almost a third of her pay off the top. But Lynne can’t get one. It isn’t the cost of the authority, which at the current registration fee of $1,200 is not outrageous, although probably unattainable for someone who chooses to skip meals to save money. It is the structural requirements behind the authority. As she tells it, even if she were given $1,200 for an authority today, she would be no closer to getting one. “If I was on my own, I’d pull a load tomorrow and not get paid for six months,” she tells me. Like a lot of contract labor, pay comes slowly and irregularly, and operating as a true independent would require a minimum of six months of fuel out of pocket, six months of grocery bills, and six months of fees to her accountant and attorney. So even though Cargill-like all carriers-takes a healthy percent for allowing her use of their authority, she stays put. “I’d need an office too,” she says after some thought. “Which could be in your house, but I don’t really have a house. I have an RV right now.” She pauses. “But that’s in storage.” There is a long pause here. “What I’m saying is I’d need an address.” - Lynne estimates she grossed $200,000 last year-that is a rough calculation based on miles driven-but that she took home less than $17,000. This for a fourteen-year veteran trucker who knows her industry inside and out. Who participates on trucking blogs, mentors younger truckers about the snares and scams. Who lives in her truck and stays out on the road three weeks at a time. Who works more than seventy hours the week I am with her, much of it spent in a state of a constant vigilance, where she sleeps in four to five hour bursts, and wakes up for three thirty a.m. appointments that are make-or-break for her career, but ignored by the distribution center on the other side. Who didn’t see her mother for two years because she didn’t have the time off and couldn’t get loads that lined up with her mother’s location. The $17,000 also-based on my experience with her-is a number likely inflated by pride. The week I’m with her, Lynne receives a weekly paycheck for just $100. Which is what she received the week before. And the week before that. “It’s in my contract,” she tells me. “No matter how many expenses I have, I always have the right to a check for one hundred dollars. So that is what I usually get . . . I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing how to stretch it.” And in reality, the week I am with her that $100 represents nothing. When going over our time together, I estimate she nets something closer to negative $150 after factoring in extravagances like cell phone bills and an unanticipated repair. So it is no surprise that when sleeping in the bunk one afternoon, I overhear her ask for a cash advance from her future $100 paychecks, so she can afford to eat dinner that night. The next morning, Lynne turns to me and says, “I think I can get back in the black. Maybe another three or four weeks of this . . .” And it is completely unclear what she means. She is losing money. Another three or four weeks like this and she will be even deeper in debt, further beholden to Cargill. “Or I could run into a ladder on the interstate that tears my brake lines,” she says to complete both our thoughts. To recap: Lynne is homeless, sleeping exclusively in the cab of a truck she does not yet own and almost certainly will eventually lose when she can no longer make payments on it. Her credit is shot. She has outstanding vet bills for her two dogs, the closest and most beloved members of her family. Her personal health is so wrecked, it’s hard to even discuss. Suffice to say, she cannot eat most food because she lost every one of her teeth and her new dentures are not properly fitted so it pains her to chew. Her obsession with Pepsi for calories shifts in my brain into absolute sadness when I learn this. She is also very good at her job. Hypervigilant on the road and extremely hardworking, a team player, who never in my presence complains about a task given to her or her lot in life. These things are not unrelated.

@@matthewcory4733 Look, I agree with some of what you said here, however, it doesn't excuse bad choices and personal responsibility. There is a ton that wasn't said in this mini documentary. For instance, how much money did McDonalds man take out of his house as the OBVIOUS bubble was inflating? How many times did he do a cash out refinance? Nobody forced him to do that. I didn't do that. He must have or he wouldn't have "given his house back to the bank when it crashed". And, he decided to retire at 58 on $350,000 BEFORE the crash. That wasn't going to work out, crash or not. Yep, government workers are benefitting from a massive scam. They vote themselves awesome pay and pensions and just keep increasing the size of government. I mean they relatives need a job too right? Then they are protected from the markets up and downs. The solution is smaller government and LESS government intervention. Let the economy be what it is going to be. We don't have "private health insurance", not even close. It is heavily regulated and interfered with by the government which is what is creating most of the issues. Either get the govt out of it or make it 100% govt controlled, you can't have it both ways. Low skill jobs should NEVER be paid well unless they are so dangerous or physically demanding that most won't do them. In fact, the only way they will ever be paid well is if the govt steps in and forces them to be. That is already happening with idiotic minimum wage laws, the effect of which is what is causing most of what you talk about. There is much less incentive to go out and get a skill so you can make more money when the govt makes it okay to not grow and learn because the pay is too high for the skill of the job so why not sit back and keep on making that $10/hour and hope they increase the wage to $15. A never ending cycle that will not end well at all. The system will never be perfect because we are humans. There will always be winners like Bezos and losers. The best we can hope for is a fair system that allows people to move up if they want to work hard and learn and grow. We've had that for the most part but the govt intrusion is slowly but surely killing it off.

@@suburbanhobbyist2752 "Low skill jobs should NEVER be paid well." Right, and that's why Silly Con Valley, Wall Street, and Washington D.C. make too much money. Unless you think overnight bitcoin millionaires are about making the right choices. You're a libertarian crank who can't see that you are CAUSING big government. The embarrassment of libertarians is that big government largely commands popular support. Can you compete with Vietnam at 28 cents an hour? You promote a hedonistic and rootless consumerism, which is based on a massive deskilling of the workforce. Markets desire more scale, more "innovation," more choice, at the expense of nations, families, communities, character, and discipline. We have undermined a producerist economy and simply print dollars to pay for imports. These tired libertarian polemics don't work on me. Are you telling me the brightest ten percent of India or China can't do my finances, coding, taxes, paperwork, doctoring lawyering, etc.?

From the book Fulfillment by MacGillis: The country had always had richer and poorer places, but the gaps were growing wider than they had ever been. Through the final decades of the nineteenth century and for the first eight decades of the twentieth century, as the country grew into the richest and most powerful nation on earth, poorer parts of the country had been catching up with richer ones. But starting in 1980, this convergence reversed. In 1980, virtually every area of the country had mean incomes that were within 20 percent of the national average-only metro New York and Washington, D.C., fell above that band, and only parts of the rural South and Southwest fell below it. But by 2013, virtually the entire Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington and the Northern California coast had incomes more than 20 percent above average. Most startlingly, a huge swath of the country’s interior had incomes more than 20 percent below average-not only the rural South and Southwest but much of the Midwest and Great Plains as well. As for the places already wealthy in 1980, they were now off the charts. Income in the Washington area was a quarter higher than in the rest of the country in 1980. By the middle of 2015, that gap was more than twice as large. Yet even as the regional divides grew, they got relatively little attention. The inequality debate focused on individual income-the top 1 percent and bottom 99 percent, and so on-rather than on the landscape of inequality across the country. To the extent the regional problem got notice, it was often described as an urban-rural divide, and it was true: rural America was in crisis. But the divide was also between cities-between a handful of winner-take-all metropolises and a much larger number of left-behind rivals. Job growth was almost twice as fast in the first six years after the Great Recession in large metro areas as in small ones, and income grew 50 percent faster. A few generations ago, urban prosperity spread across the country: in the 1960s, the twenty-five cities with the highest median income included Cleveland, Milwaukee, Des Moines, and Rockford, Illinois. Now, nearly all the richest cities were on the coasts. Wages in the very largest cities in the country had grown nearly twenty percentage points more since 1970 than wages in the rest of the country’s cities. By 2019, more than 70 percent of all venture capital was flowing to just three states: California, New York, and Massachusetts. “A handful of metro areas have seen such concentrations of wealth almost unprecedented in human history, while a much larger set has seen their jobs evaporate and their economic bases contract,” wrote the sociologist Robert Manduca.