Letter of Complaint

Dear Flipside Media

I am writing to you to complain about your job advertisement. This is because it has infringed many legal, ethical and contractual rules and regulations. I think that this is very explicit because of the ways you are trying to promote certain aspects of your company. Within this letter I am going to show all of the things that are wrong with your advert and after looking into it I hope that you make the sufficient changes to your application.

First of all I am going to explain the contractual rules in general. A contract is a legal agreement that relate to your own terms of employment. And within the details of your advert the details are lawfully wrong and break many rules. For example let’s start with the hours that you are saying they could work. By advertising it as 'between 10 - 45 hours per week'. This breaches the Equality Act because it means that sometimes it will vary between a full and part time job as anything under 16 hours is part time. Another thing with having such variable hours is that the employee will not be able to get paid the same amount each week which can have a great effect on their livelihood as they will have such a variable income which is entirely unfair to the employee. This brings me directly onto the pay. Having such a variable pay between 14,000 and 35,000 thousand is very un-precise and is very unfair on the worker.

This links to exclusivity clauses. This is a legal document that only allows the employee to work for a single agency and not any others. In your advert you say that 'if successful you must not apply for other positions of this nature'. This means that the documentary that is made if bought of the employee can only be used by 'Flipside Media' else you can face legal action against you. Another thing is a confidentiality clause, this states that it requires both sides to keeps the confidentiality agreement secret. These are essentially in place for data purposes. They are there to disclose any information that needs to be kept secret or confidential.

Employment Legislation

This advert breaks many different regulations, one of these is the Equality Act (2010). The Equality Act states that you cannot discriminate against Age, Gender and Race when thinking about employing staff. You have infringed this by firstly stating that you only want to employ staff under the age of 30. It is illegal to either turn someone down or sack someone because of their age. As well as this you are saying that you will only recruit someone if they are Christian. This fatherly breaks the rules of this act as you are discriminating against people’s beliefs. Even though you are a Christian based group you cannot advertise it like that. By saying ‘female victims and male offenders’. This is stereotypical and is wrong. This is because there are a lot of cases where there are male victims and female offenders. By saying this it is both a stereotype and sexual discrimination. This brings me onto the equal opportunities legislation. This is where you as an employer are supposed to recruit fairly and without any prejudice or discrimination. You have clearly not abided by any of these rules or regulations and have broken the Equality Act and its codes of practice.

One of the most important things within your job advert is the proposal for someone to create a short documentary for you. You have not abided by the employees’ rights or liability because you are asking them to make something quite controversial, as well as this they will not be protected until they are employed meaning that you are getting someone to do something against their right. Employee’s liability is insurance is what protects an individual against accidents. If they are not employed then they will not be covered. This brings me onto health and safety. It is a workers right to have cover for if they are injured at work, but if you are getting them to do something for you, for example this documentary and they are injured in the production they are not covered. Trade Unions are there to fight for workers are there to fight for worker’s rights and to protect workers. BECTU is an example of a trade union and their fee is £120 a year. But they only are there to help employers, not applicants. This means that they would not be able to do anything if something happens to the person who is making the documentary. If something was to happen to the film maker while they were producing the documentary they would not be covered as they are not under your employment and hence forth not covered by BECTU.

Ethical Issues

Codes of practice are not part of the law but they are there to protect the people evolved and the consumer. You as the employer are responsible for making policies, codes of practice and procedures. These are there to set who you could and shouldn’t talk to, for example under 18’s need to have parental consent. Also would applicants be able to find victims and offenders to talk to under data protection? Under data protection none of the people involved should be named. All of this is to avoid any legal issues.

Representation is the way that people are represented in the media, this can be problematic. This all has to do with how someone is portrayed and if an applicant makes the video in a certain way then the audience’s opinions upon certain people or groups may change. This relates to social concerns. This is because the media can easily create social problems through the way that certain things may be represented. This can be similar to stereotypes. In this case you have said that only men are offenders and women are victims.

Legal Issues

There are certain regulatory bodies exist to prevent offence in the media, for example OFCOM. The broadcasting code is there to enforce rules based on the law to protect the audience. The BBC has its own Code of Practice, this is called the BBC Trust.

In this circumstance you have claimed that you would want to interviews to be ‘complemented’ by re-enactments and dramatization. In section 2.2 ‘harm and offence’ it claims that you must not mislead the audience. If you are going to dramatize these matters then you are in danger of doing so. Another thing is protecting under 18’s. You will break this rule because you have asked the employees to make ‘dramatizations’, by doing this you are in danger of exaggerating them, this can result in misleading the viewer. If the documentary is going to include anything graphical or distressing then you would have to abide by the watershed. In part 1.12 it claims that ‘violence, whether verbal or physical, that is easily imitable by children in a manner that is harmful or dangerous’, it then goes onto say ‘must not be broadcasted before the watershed’. In your advert you claim that you want to show it to high school pupils, this means that this could potentially be shown to people of quite a young age, this means that you will be showing potentially harmful, distressing and violent footage to people of a young age, hence forth breaking these rules. OFCOM exists because of the broadcasting Act (1990) and the Communications Act (2003). These were previously in place to prevent any harmful material being broadcasted to protect the audience. The Obscene Publications Act (1959) was in place to prevent any ‘Obscene’ material to be broadcasted, this was put into place to strengthen the law concerning pornography. 

When creating this video you would have to think about the certificate from which it would require. In my opinion I think that this video would have to be certified as either a 15 or 18 because it could contain some harmful and distressing content and relating that to the OFCOM broadcasting code. More importantly when looking at the BBFC it says that violence and threat are permitted as long as it is not too graphic but violence may be detailed if it is verbal. I quote ‘There may be detailed verbal references to sexual violence but the depiction of sexual violence must be discreet and justified by context.’ After looking more into the BBFC as long as it is not too graphic it will probably be given a 15 rating. The BBFC is an independent body that classifies films by age.

The Intellectual Property Law is there to make sure that people cannot use copyrighted material unless they have the right to do so. This is a big problem with the expansion of the internet as more and more copyrighted material is being used. In the advert you say that the applicant should use a popular soundtrack to appeal to the audience. This would not be able to happen, especially with the fact that you would want to buy it off the applicant at the end. This is not allowed to happen if they do not have the rights to the music. This law applies to anything that involves creativity for example if someone owns an idea or form of media then they have the rights for it.

The video as a whole should be left in the applicant’s property and not with the company as they do not know what you might do with it. Furthermore people being interviewed may have agreed on them being filmed but not for them to have public viewing. All in all you should remove the small print and simply state reasonable expenses with receipts, that way you cannot lawfully own the video.

Furthermore in terms of the small print you are not allowed to promote and force upon your religious views and you are breaking the Equal Opportunities Act, this is because you are discriminating against the employees.

Yours sincerely

Stephen Abbs