Employment legislation covers laws and standards that ensure that
employees do not suffer from dangerous or unhealthy working environments or
practices. Employment legislation has a number of different parts.
Health and safety ensure a safe and healthy working environment. The
BBC for example has strict policies regarding accident and incident reporting,
guidelines for health and safety, a risk assessment procedure and a security
policy. Employees will be expected to abide by these rules and know the
policies in order to help the BBC make sure the working environment is safe. On
the BBC website, all these policies can be found and there is even a separate
section for freelancers who are unlikely to be a familiar with the policies as
full time employees.
Most media industry employers (if not all) will have a policy that
ensures equal opportunities for all by not allowing any discrimination in terms
of gender, race, disability, sexuality, religion or age. There is a law against
this type of discrimination but some employers will be better at providing
equal opportunities than others. Channel 4 even goes as far as to regularly
monitor figures, stating on their website that ‘the representation of
ethnic minorities amongst permanent staff in 2010 was 13% (2009: 12%). Women
continue to form the majority of staff at 57% (2009: 55%)’.
The BBC recently was criticised for age discrimination under
Employment Equality Age regulations when ‘Mia Costello, Managing Editor of regional station
BBC Radio Solent, told presenters in an official email that they should prevent
any "elderly" callers from being allowed on air.’
Employers must get insurance in order to cover themselves, should they
be liable to pay compensation to an employee who has injured or become sick due
to their job. The BBC recommends this insurance to all filmmakers in order to ‘provide indemnity in
respect of your legal liability to pay compensation for death, disease or
bodily injury to employees arising out of and during the course of their
employment’. This means the filmmaker will be
covered by their insurance should they have to pay compensation to someone.
Employees will have many rights in their contracts
regarding payments, sickness, holidays and the right to not be harassed,
bullied or discriminated against. They will also have the right to belong to a
trade union, such as BECTU. Trade unions such as this can
provide many benefits to members such as negotiating pay, conditions and
contracts with employers and helping individual members with support, advice
and representation if they find themselves having trouble with employers.
Employees must also be aware of intellectual property
issues such as copyright and trademarks. Workers in the media industry will
often be in creative roles and will need to understand whether they as the
author of the work will own the rights to it or if the company that they are
producing the work for owns the rights. Scriptwriters will likely sell all the
rights to their original work in order for the screenplay to be turned into a
film by a production company. This means once the company own the copyright
over the script, they can do with whatever they please and the original author
has no rights over it. An employee in a TV company may also need to obtain
copyright information if they wish to use a clip from another show in their own
media product.
Trademarks are signs in the forms of a logo or word that
distinguishes one company’s brand from its competitors. These trademarks must
be registered with the Intellectual Property Office and as they stand for a
recognisable brand in the consciousness of the public, have to be protected
from misrepresentation. Disney has many major trademarks including the world
famous Disneyland logo and it is important to protect this family friendly
brand from anything that could ruin its reputation. For example Disney refused
to release the controversial film Kids through their subsidiary Miramax due to
the content and potential damage to Disney’s brand.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Join me in conversation! Please leave a comment on your own pondering.