Wednesday, 22 June 2016

Contractual, Legal and Ethical issues, Job Advertisement and Letter

To whom it concern,                                                                                                       20th June 2016
                                                                                                                                                        

I am writing this letter in response to your job advertisement. I came across your advertisement whilst looking for a job and was interested in your current job offer, however as i read though it i noticed that there were some unethical and lawfully incorrect points in your advertisement and am writing to you to make you aware of these in-corrections. The first thing I noticed was some of the statements said in the job description at the top with your hours and salary being vague and not really explaining the reason for the salary boundary to be so wide apart. The reason i bring this up is that it has a boundary of £15,000 to £35,000 per annum which only adds to the confusion when the hours are also not specific with the hours being from 10-45 without explaining why they are so far apart. To correct this, you must specify the hours and salary as potential applicants may want to know what they are signing up for.

The next statement i noticed was that you specified that you are looking for male and female however using this set of words will leave out transgender people for example and could be counted as discrimination even if that wasn't your intention and may be perfectly find with transgender applicants. This could be corrected by not even including a gender section in the advertisement as a gender description is only needed in specific job roles that are only considered to be for men or female and are becoming fewer and fewer, this means that there is no need for your job to specify what genders are compatible. Specifying gender is not essential and could possible put off applications who don't like to be judge by their gender. 

Another statement that you have included is that you would like applicants to age below 30 which is unethical and also against the law to include as the law states that you cannot discriminate people on the age, sexuality, gender, race or disability, which means that you are not allowed to specially ask for a certain age unless you have a certain task that old employees will not be able to carry out. In your job advertisement you don't have any tasks that the older audience cannot do so you should not be looking for a specific age. To add on to this is the fact that you want your applicants to uphold Christian beliefs and are unable to apply if they don't is ridiculous requirement as you are losing a large amount of applicants who may be better for the job. I understand that you are a Christian organisation however religion doesn't have anything to do with the job and as it has no relevance to the job you would be discriminating all other religions. In mind of the above complaints I have bought up, i would like to remind you that there is ''The equality act 2010 legally protects people from discrimination in the work place and wider society'' Which is the legislation that protects people from being discriminated. This piece of legislation is the only current act against discrimination and gets rid of all the previous laws to make the laws easier to understand and is to identify what counts as discrimination and what is illegal. There is also ''The equal opportunities legislation'' which expanded on some of the laws in the other legislation and focused on equality in the workplace and states that discrimination against age, disability, marriage and civil partnership, gender, pregnancy and maternity, race and religion is prohibited. Also to protect against discrimination is trade unions which protect the rights of employees of a certain trade and can stop discrimination in the workplace if you report it.

As you are an employer you should be giving codes of practice and policies to follow as an applicant is not a part of your company and will not be protected and could cause issues if something goes wrong. You have asked your applicants to include school children in their video, this means that everyone you want them to feature is 16 or under 16 is a problem as the they can’t legally give your applicants permission to film them as they are under the age of consent to be filmed. There is also an issue of you asking your applicants to ask young victims about the traumatic events they have been though, not only is this unethical its inappropriate and would be unfair to bring all of the feeling back to young victims. Getting them to re-enact this would be disturbing and an awful thing to ask children to do. For these reasons you should remove this as a requirement for your applicants. Furthermore, there is an issue with you automatically pinning males as offenders as it is not just male who are offenders and not just females who are victims as many males also are victims. This is morally incorrect and should be re-worded to stop it from sounding stereotypical and bias.

Continuing on from my latest point you have must actually consider the current laws from Ofcom which are laws that where put in place to protect under 18's. Ofcom was created because of the communication act that was passed in 2003 as well of the broadcasting act that was passed in 1990. Ofcom are in charge of regulating Television by creating rules for broadcasters to follow. Your advertisement has a brief telling applicants to make a video to get your job however if an applicant followed your brief would be break some of Ofcom's rules which could have huge implications. The rule you want you applicants to broke are as follows 'where statutory or other legal restrictions apply preventing personal identification, broadcasters should also be particularly careful not to provide clues which may lead to the identification of those who are not yet adult and who are, or might be, involved as a victim'. This is an issue as you specifically tell your applicants to 'Interview teenagers and other individuals who may have been affected by this topic'. Your applicants would be breaking this as you want them to talk teens who are generally under 18 and would not be an adult and are discussing them being a victim which is not allowed. Another rule that is broken is the rule of 'Material that might seriously impair the physical, mental or moral development of people under eighteen must not be broadcast'. You have broken this as you ask your applicants to 'Produce a short documentary that can be shown to children' that would be showing under age teenagers material that would most likely impair their mental or moral development.

This also is a violation against the obscene publications act which was passed in 1959 and then was re-done in 1964. This is a violation as it states that 'it is an offence to publish any content whose effect may deprave and corrupt those who see it. There is also the BBFC which protects children and adults from harmful content by using certifications to regulate content. This would mean that your applicants videos would need to have an adult rating as the discussion about rape and the re-enactments would not be appropriate for school children. Lastly You have put in your brief that you would like popular music and then go onto state at the bottom that they would only be compensated £20 for the production, however this would be impossible as £20 is not enough to get a popular soundtrack and still pay for production. This will possibly encourage your applicants to break the law and not pay for the music which would reflect badly on your company and would get your applicants in trouble.  

                                                   

       

No comments:

Post a Comment