Savannah Houston's BTEC Media Blog: Job Description Letter

The Whitehouse

Low Road

Norton Subcourse

Norwich

Norfolk

NR14 6SA

09/07/13

To whom it may concern,

The purpose of this letter is to point out the contractual, legal and ethical issues with your job advertisement. The job description is exceedingly broad and anyone who might want to apply for this job would find it incredibly hard to distinguish between the salary rates that you are offering them. This should be a fixed number or should thoroughly explain the jobs needed to qualify for each salary payment. However, this letter does not provide that. Furthermore, both confidentiality and exclusivity clauses are as broad as the job role itself, not enough information is provided, you have just outlined that they shouldn’t apply for a similar job of that nature. Perhaps a list of jobs for the employee to look over would be ideal. Also you haven’t stated that the exclusivity clause is in fact a contract and have not warned a future employee they need to be signing this contract.

As you outlined in your job description, The Equality Act (2010) has been broken, you have specified what age group you would like to work and you have specified what religious views a future employee should have to work here which is not allowed. The brief you have provided suggests that employees are responsible for their own actions both physically and mentally, this is under the section of Employer’s Liability. If you hire someone and they are emotionally damaged or physically hurt while in your care, then you take the responsibility for that, which is also stated in the Health and Safety legislation under the part of ‘General duties of employers to their employees’ which fully explains that employers are responsible for any of the actions that an employee might do. Since applicants are liable for their own actions because they are not employed, anything that might happen during the shoot, whether it may be emotional or physical, is under their own care, not yours. A trade union is an organisation where members who are usually workers or employees, negotiate agreements with employers about pay and conditions of their place of work, discussing big changes such as redundancy and also discussing members concerns with employers.

Codes of practice could avoid legal issues with applicants by stating dress codes and other simple rules. For instance if you stated that employees cannot wear over 3 inch heels, and your employee wore 5 inch heels and had an accident, you would not be liable for this because they did not follow the codes of practice that you set up. The video you are asking applicants to produce breaks ethical codes. Victims of rape would most likely not want to talk to about their experience and would get emotionally damaged by the video. In this brief you have stereotyped against genders simply stating that all females are victims of rape and that males are rapists. However, this is not correct as both genders can be affected by rape. You have also stereotyped against a whole social group of people, you have referred to them as teenagers rather than young people or another word. Your video could create problems within social groups.

As you have stated in your briefing, you would like re-enactments of rape scenes. This could be considered crude and vulgar and may be taken down by the big time regulator, Ofcom. If you would like re-enactments then you should be showing your program after the Watershed, with actors that are above the age of 18 years old. Ofcom clearly states that the word children are people under the age of 15. Appropriate scheduling is considered the nature of content, the amount of children taken out and whether this would be during school time or holidays, the start and finish time of the programme, the nature of the channel that the programme would be featuring in and the likely audiences that would be watching this. You need to state this in your job description, thoroughly and outline where this will be advertised and what you are doing with it. Ofcom exists because of the Communications Act (2003) which is responsible for telephones, mobiles and any other form of communication device. Also, The Broadcasting Act (1990) is also one of the reasons that Ofcom exists. Also, the things you have mentioned in your job description and the proposal in the video may conflict with the Obscene Publications Act 1959, you should not be reconstructing rape scenes or try to minimise the nudity within it. The Obscene Publications Act 1959, limits the amount of pornography within the nature of content. Stated here, ‘An Act to amend the law relating to the publication of obscene matter; to provide for the protection of literature; and to strengthen the law concerning pornography.’ If you were going to produce this video and put it online or out for the public to see, then your applicants would need to work with the BBFC and chose a suitable age rating for their documentary. Given the nature of the content, the ideas and the recommendations you have provided to be put into the video, this would be receive an 18 as it would include strong portrayals of sexual activity, scenes of sexual violence, very strong violence and frequent strong language. This then means that this video is only suitable for adults and no children are allowed to take part in sexual scenes.

Lastly, you have mentioned that you would like a popular music track for all of the documentaries, if they are being published then you would need an agreement or permission from the record company or the artist saying you would like to use their music. If not, you are subsequently breaking the Copyright law. You could be penalized for this.

Thank-you for taking your time to read this letter, I hope you take into consideration what I have said and which acts you have broken and could be breaking in the future.

Yours sincerely,

Savannah Houston

References

Paragraph 1

Exclusivity and confidentiality clauses http://www.gwa.de/fileadmin/media-center/Dokumente/GWA_Englisch/Exclusivity_Clause_Agency_Contracts.pdf

Paragraph 2

Trade Union https://www.gov.uk/join-trade-union/joining-a-trade-union

Health and Safety http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/37/contents

Paragraph 3

Codes of practice http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/business-sponsors/points/sponsoringmigrants/employingmigrants/codesofpractice/

Paragraph 4

Ofcom http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/broadcasting/broadcast-codes/broadcast-code/protecting-under-18s/