On November 30, the Groningen district court will decide whether scholarship PhDs at the UMCG are employed by the institute or not.
It’s been nearly three years since the MD and PhD candidates at the UMCG officially raised the alarm. They say they do the exact same job as their fellow PhD candidates who were hired before 2016 or after 2018.
They are official employees of the UMCG, even though they’re part of the controversial PhD experiment. This means they’re considered students and receive a scholarship, which is a lot lower than a salary.
Cheaper
The candidates are part of an MD/PhD track. It’s a special programme that allows them to get their PhD while also finishing their studies to become a doctor. Just like the UG, the UMCG treats them like students. That makes it cheaper for the institute and gives more people the opportunity to do a PhD. As students, the PhDs would have more freedom.
On January 21, 2019, the MD/PhDs sounded the alarm: 58 of them objected to their status as student and the inequality of their remuneration. What followed was months of back-and-forths, with the UMCG arguing that the PhDs’ demands were ‘inadmissible’. According to them, the RUG was responsible for the PhD track, not the UMCG.
Change tack
After this, he PhD students decided to change tack. Instead of taking their complaint to the administrative judge, they decided to go to the regional court. ‘They kept getting hung up on the procedural side of things’, says Dino Jongsma, who supervises the MD/PhDs. ‘But that didn’t help us win the case. We hope that a civil court can properly determine whether the PhDs have a labour agreement.’
Jongsma will argue before the district court that the MD/PhDs are employees rather than students. It’s going to be interesting an interesting case, in part because of the current discussion concerning delivery services like Deliveroo and Uber. ‘In my citation, I outlined the same logic from that discussion. Are people doing work, what are they being paid, and how does the hierarchy work?’
Back pay
If the court decides in favour of the PhDs, the UMCG will owe them back pay and end-of-year and holiday bonuses. The institute will also have to sign them up for the pension fund. The potential amounts due vary from five to fifteen thousand euros for each scholarship PhD.
The case could have severe consequences for the UG and the UMCG. In spite of criticism from both the scholarship PhDs themselves and politicians, the university decided to create 1,500 positions for the PhD Scholarship Experiment.
Warning
Education minister Van Engelshoven warned the university of potential lawsuits when the institute decided to extend the experiment.
However, if the MD/PhDs win, it doesn’t automatically mean that other scholarship PhDs will get employment status, says Jongsma. ‘This is a very particular group of people who are combining their medical degree with the promotion track.’