Should PhD students be classed as employees?

Tom Livermore and Jamie Gallagher

THE GUARDIAN - Thursday 16 July 2015

Two early-career researchers go head-to-head to argue for and against defining PhD candidates as fully-fledged university employees

Queen Mary University of London wants to change the status of its PhD students to that of employees. A current and a former PhD student argue for and against this change.
Against employee status 
Tom Livermore, PhD Student at University College London, says:  While I recognise that there are advantages associated with employment, I believe that remaining a student provides significant benefits of its own and better reflects the training element of a doctorate.  The most common concern of my peers was what might happen to our pay. At present, our stipends are exempt from tax, making our reasonable, but not extravagant, earnings more comparable with other graduate salaries. Losing our student status would mean either an effective pay cut through taxation, or perhaps a compensatory increase in our funding. In this case training a PhD candidate would become more expensive; potentially meaning funding bodies would be able to support fewer PhDs, not a desirable outcome to my mind.

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