How Housing Hardship Became Indentured Servitude

Amherst College introduced a new requirement for those with housing hardship to stay on campus for the upcoming summer. Housing hardship is a status recognition granted by the Office of Student Care that a student can’t go home for a myriad of reasons: discrimination, health access, legal issues, and more. The status usually results in the student receiving housing over winter and summer breaks. However, the college recently changed its policy so that students with a housing hardship must now have a job within the college to stay on campus. Demanding this physical labor from a group with housing challenges amounts to indentured servitude, and let me tell you why.

These students will be required to work the entire summer: From the day the spring semester ends to the day the fall semester starts. Of course, students have never been allowed to stay on campus for free. In previous years, students with housing hardships were charged $200 a week to stay on campus. This new requirement is not based on money, but employment by the college.

This is the same college that has recognized that these students face danger or other exigent circumstances preventing them from returning home. While students with safer living situations are allowed to return home with no expectation of working, students facing these dangerous circumstances, who also tend to be economically disadvantaged, are made to work for the college — for jobs that pay barely above minimum wage — in exchange for safe housing.

This is indentured servitude. And while the college has had private communications to students with housing hardships insisting that things “will be figured out” to let them stay on campus, it doesn’t seem like anything is being “figured out.” I know of a student that, despite having a registered housing hardship, still has no choice but to get an apartment in town over the summer. This is a disheartening reality that shows the college administration’s disconnect from students that are facing these harsh conditions.

I’ve talked to students with housing hardships. I’m one of them. I can’t return home because I’m a transgender woman from Texas. If I were to use the women’s restroom in the town hall I go to vote at, my town would be fined $25,000. If I were to try to go to the women’s domestic violence shelter for counseling that I’ve used for a majority of my life, I would be turned away.

The college has decided that it should leverage this vulnerability to get us to work for Commencement for 50 cents above minimum wage. We must forfeit our summer vacation that other students use to relax or get resume-building work experience, and instead do the only things “poors” are ever expected to do: provide their physical labor in exchange for temporary shelter.

This situation also applies to another group of students that need housing hardships — international students unable to return home because of the Trump Administration’s immigration policies. These students often have a high risk of detainment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which could send them to a third country that has entered into an agreement with the United States to hold detainees. These students are also expected to work for the college. Their situation is being manipulated to get them to work over the summer. This is highly unethical, and it doesn’t seem like it has dawned on the staff of the college that they have created a form of indentured servitude.