Friday, 12 July 2013

Letter Essay



East Norfolk Sixth Form College

09/07/2013

Dear Mr Cook,

I am writing to you today to discuss your job application form, I believe that the job is very discriminative and explicit. Throughout this letter, I will discuss your help wanted letter and mention what is wrong and why it is wrong and back it up with evidence.

There are a lot of problems with your terms concerning your recruitment flyer, you have a very broad range of pay and hours and this can compromise a persons financial and time stand which will affect their choice in applying.

According to your flyer, the job will entail you to interview teenagers and other individuals who might be/have been affected by the topic, this will affect the confidentiality clause which states that you cannot give information out on children or vulnerable adults without express permission of the parent or guardian.

One problem with your advertisement is that you put you are looking for a male or female applicant aged below 30, this inflicts the equality act, which states that “Discrimination on grounds of race, gender or age is illegal.” A good example of this is BBC’s Countryfile presenter Miriam O’Reilly, who was awarded £150,000 after being fired for being ‘too old’. A way of resolving this is to keep age out of the question entirely, the only reason you could put this is if you are looking for talent to star in this production. Another problem is that your flyer states that the employer will be interviewing teenagers and other individuals who have been affected by date rape. This will breach the employers liability and employees rights, which state that the employee will be penalised if they give information of children and vulnerable adults. Since you will not be protected until you are employed, the employee is vulnerable to going to prison, this also links into the health and safety regulation. One way you can solve this is if you use actors to impersonate the victim don’t show their face on camera, and use a different name so that they cannot get tracked anyway. Trade unions were created to protect the employees from things like this, the members pay a yearly fee of £120 to be in these groups and it doesn’t hurt to invest in it in case legal topics come up. They’re also created for the protection of employees.

Another problem I’ve found is the ethical issues you have raised in this flyer, I believe that stating your religious views breaches the equality act of 2010, the act states that “Religion means any religion and a reference to religion includes a reference to a lack of religion.” Which means that you cannot influence your beliefs onto other people with a different religion, especially if it a job requirement, the only right way of improving this is that you keep your religious views off the flyer entirely. This ties in with the codes and practice, which equal opportunities employers aim to recruit fairly and they produce these codes of practice that shows they comply with the equality act. Another problem is that you want the employer to interview “male offenders” which in itself is a breach of safety, but the fact that you want to represent rapist as male teenagers is discrimination and you are representing a group with its lowest percentage. A way of changing this would be to put “offenders” instead of “male offenders”. This links in with how people are represented in the media, and how it is not right to portray a certain race, gender, or religion as negative.

One more problem I have found with your advertisement is there are a lot of legal issues involved with this, like protecting the under 18’s which I have already mentioned but according to Ofcoms laws it states that:

·         “Material that might seriously impair the physical, mental or moral development of people under eighteen must not be broadcast.

·         In the provision of services, broadcasters must take all reasonable steps to protect people under eighteen. For television services, this is in addition to their obligations resulting from the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (in particular, Article 27, see Appendix 2).

·         Children must also be protected by appropriate scheduling from material that is unsuitable for them.”


This is why the water shed was put in place, the watershed is a law that states that you cannot show programs on television that could be seen as obscene before 9:00pm, another fact about this is that shows after the watershed get progressively worse as time goes by. Also, if it wasn’t for the communications act of 2003, and the broadcasting act of 1990, Ofcom wouldn’t even exist. This ties in with the obscene publications act of 1959, they need to do a procedure which they will:

“1. Test of obscenity.

2. Prohibition of publication of obscene matter.

3. Powers of search and seizure.

4. Defence of public good.

5. Citation, commencement and extent.”

If this project was published, the BBFC would likely give it a 15 certification, if that, it would probably be an 18 due to dramatizations of rape towards under 16’s. It also says that you need to back the documentary up with a new hit music soundtrack and that we will be compensated £20 for the track, this is another flaw due to the intellectual property law, which states that you cannot use anything that is copyrighted or trademarked without express permission, and usually they would ask for a fee which would be significantly more than £20.

That’s all the changes I believe you need to do on your advertisement, thank you for reading this letter and I hope to hear from you soon.

Yours Sincerely,

Mikey Tibble

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