Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

One of the last traditional company towns in America, Empire was wholly owned by United States Gypsum, the company that makes Sheetrock. The place was a throwback to the much romanticized heyday of American manufacturing, when factory jobs offered workers a sure footing in the middle class and the chance to raise a family without fear of displacement. Empire was six miles north of “the gyp,” an open-pit gypsum mine nestled at the foot of the Selenite mountain range. There miners detonated blasts of anfo—an explosive blend of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil—to dislodge white, chalky chunks of ore from five terraced pits, the largest a half-mile across. Haul trucks shuttled sixty-ton batches of gypsum up the highway to a drywall plant on the edge of town. There workers pulverized it, heated it to 500 degrees in massive kettles, and shaped it into the wallboard found in homes across the American West. Past Empire’s factory, single-story cottages lined four main residential streets planted with cottonwoods, elms, and silver poplars. U.S. Gypsum subsidized the rents, which were as low as $110 for an apartment or $250 for a house. (Mechanics in the drywall plant made up to $22 an hour and equipment operators got a little bit less, which meant employees could typically cover a month’s rent with a day or two of work.) The company also paid for TV, sewer, trash, and internet service. Since employees’ expenses were low and their income reliable, the notion of living paycheck to payche...