Sep 29, 2017
Here KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks with Jessica Bruder @jessbruder about her book, Nomadland. In this, Bruder tells the stories of these nomadic laborers navigating a changing economic landscape for America’s retirees. A new labor force is growing across the country: “workampers,” older Americans who have turned to short-term transient work when Social Security and their retirement cushions have fallen short.
In its review, Kirkus stated that "What photographer Jacob Riis did for the tenement poor in How the Other Half Lives (1890) and what novelist Upton Sinclair did for stockyard workers in The Jungle (1906), journalist Bruder now does for a segment of today’s older Americans forced to eke out a living as migrant workers."
Jessica Bruder is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on subcultures and the dark corners of the economy. She has written for Harper’s, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Bruder teaches narrative writing at the Columbia School of Journalism.