Contractual, Legal and Ethical Issues Letter

24th March, 2020

To Whom it may concern,

The reason I am writing this letter is to point out all of the the legal, ethical and contractual issues which are present in this job advertisement. To begin with, the job role itself that is being advertised isn't even explicitly stated in terms of what the employee will be expected to do on a day to day basis. Like the advertisement even states itself, the description is extremely "broad", which is not helpful to any person who considers applying to this job role, as they will not know what to fully expect. Due to contracts like these being legal agreements, the potential employer must be clear about when they are required to work, the amount of payment they will receive, and what they are actually being asked to do. As I have already stated, the final is not made clear enough in this ad at all, and the other contract requirements have not been handled much better here, with the salary mentioned being way too vague, with a twenty-thousand pound in between, and the same can be said for the expected hours, with a buffer of thirty-five hours! This contract's small print also is quite minimal, stating at one point that the person applying for the position will only be recompensed twenty pounds for the short documentary piece they are being requested to make in order to be considered when applying, which based on the requirements within the documentary the ad mentions, is nowhere near a fair payment to the creator. The ad also mentions in terms of a confidentiality (or more specifically exclusivity) clause that if the applicant is successful, they may not apply to any other jobs of a similar nature.

A big issue within this job ad is that the 'Equality Act' from 2010 is infringed blatantly, with it stating that the applicant must follow Christianity in order for them to be allowed to apply to the position. This is explained in the small print that this is wanted due to the organisation being "Christian lead" and that they want the employee to promote the ideals of this faith, but the Equality Act clearly states that discrimination due to race, gender, age, religion or belief and many other similar factors is illegal. This of course also means that the ad asking for applicants to be under the age of thirty is also against this act. According to the equal opportunities legislation, "all workers within an organisation should be entitled to and have access to all of the organisations facilities at every stage of employment" and this includes the pre-employment phase. Something also notable is in relation to employers' liability and employees' rights, and is linked to the video that the ad asks the applicants to create for the employer. In the description of what needs to be included in this documentary which should be made by the applicant, it is stated that "female victims and male offenders" of rape should be interviewed for the project. The issue here is that in order to be able to interview a "male offender", the applicant will be putting themselves into an unsafe situation, due to what the person being interviewed is obviously capable of. Usually, employers are responsible for the safety and well-being of their employees, but as the applicant is not actually employed by the company yet while making this, the person would not be protected, even though they are being asked to put themselves in this unsafe situation. Trade unions exist in order to protect the rights and interests of workers, meaning that if the people making the documentary were employed by the company asking them to make it this way, they would be protected by the trade unions, but as stated, they are making them while simply being just applicants, meaning that they have absolutely no protection from the danger they are being put into here.

Something which should already be clear from all the issues I have already stated related to the documentary the applicants are being asked to create is that this ad includes a large amount of ethical issues as well, on top of all the legal issues it also runs into. Something important to mention is that employers of this kind are expected (and are responsible) to draw up a list of policies, procedures and codes of practise, which are meant to promote how the person working in that profession should behave and attempt to avoid any legal issues. For example, the BBC has codes that relate to this ad's instructions, like with 'working with kids' and ' treating everyone equally' - both of which by the way, this ad's instructions do not follow well. In this advert, no codes of any sort are promoted, which is a bad idea on the employer's front if they want to avoid any legal issues that could possibly arise from the way the applicants behave or act while making this product. The product the applicants are being requested to specifically make also includes a lot of issues when it comes to representation. For example, the ad asks for the people to involve only male offenders and female victims of rape. This being done in the documentary could definitely send across the message to people watching that only men are rapists against women, and that crimes of this manner that occur between two men, two women, or the vice versa of the situation displayed in the ad are extremely unlikely to occur or even maybe at all, which in reality is extremely false. On top of the representational issues with this, asking to interview real victims of sexual crimes of this kind and using them to create a documentary can potentially cause serious upset or possibly even re-surfacing trauma to the victims seen in the documentary, due to them being forced to go through the traumatic events from their past again on camera (especially for the teenage participants in this part of the product, which again, the ad suggests specifically).

Now, if all of the issues already mentioned above were not thought to be serious enough to be a concern to some, the biggest problems present here are the legal issues. Relating mostly yet again to the documentary the applicants are asked to create, this does not follow quite a few of the rules set in place for media products by Ofcom's broadcasting code (which exists due to the existence of 2003's 'Communications Act' which regulates television programmes and 'The Broadcasting Act' from 1990 that came before it which relate to the protection of those watching). Specifically, the codes on 'protecting the under 18's' and 'harm and offence' are not followed as well as they could be. The first code states that "factors like age, maturity, the subject matter, as well as previous life experiences, can affect how they may respond to such exposure", and so the fact that the ad is looking to interview under 18's about their history with being sexually harassed, it does not seem to be looking out for them the best it could be. With the second code mentioned, the section on harm and offence explicitly states that "factual programmes or items or portrayals of factual matters must not materially mislead the audience", which in the case of this documentary, relates yet again to the way it only shows male offenders and female victims. Also, the 'Obscene Publications Act 1959' is relevant to this documentaries wanted inclusions, as the applicants re asked to include "re-enactments" interspersed between the interviews, which may not be allowed according to this act depending on how explicit they are, as it created an offence for publishing what can be described as "obscene material". As well as all this, the ad specifies that the target audience they want for this product will be children at high school, so they can promote an anti date-rape campaign, but again due to all the features they want included in it, like re-enactments, potentially explicit interviews, and so on, there is a high potential that the BBFC (or the British Board of Film Classification) may rate the film with a certification too high for high school children to technically be allowed to be shown it by the school's, as features like the re-enactments of rape might cause that rating to be put in place for the documentary. Finally, the ad states that the applicant should make sure to include a "popular music soundtrack" to appeal to the target audience. However, in the small print of the ad at the bottom, it is explained that the applicant will be recompensed a total of twenty pounds for the video's production. Judging by the fact that the ad specifies to use "popular" music, the assumption would be that the applicant must use music that is not royalty free, which would mean that they would have to pay royalty fees to the owner of the songs in order to be allowed to legally use their copyrighted content in the documentary. The issue here is that royalty fees for music, depending on who owns the copyright for the track, can be very expensive, and twenty pounds would definitely not be anywhere near enough to be able to legally fund an entire soundtrack that fits the description the ad has provided.

Your sincerely,

William Grimmer