Chapter 3- Understanding the Legal and ethical obligations in the Television and Film Industries
Contracts
Fixed Term Contract
Fixed Term contracts are given by employers on the basis that the contract will terminate at a future date when a specific term Expires so basically covering for an employee who is on sick or maternity leave.
Freelance
A Freelancer or freelance worker is a person who pursues a profession without a long term commitment to any one employer. An example of this would be its your business you work for yourself you can work whenever you want it is totally up to you.
Hourly Rates
Hourly wage describes a rate an employer agrees to pay a worker per hour. The average or mean basically is an estimated hourly Rate calculated using the varying hourly rates of a group of workers in a specific occupation.
Irregular Patterns
Grammar, not conforming to the prevalent pattern or patterns of formation,inflection , construction, etc. so Basically you do not have certain time to work different times every day.
Ethical
Ethical obligations are less likely to be required by law than contractual and employment legislation though they can be equally important as if a TV or film company does not behave ethically, there could be financial and legal repercussions. In my media classes, we have already looked at:
A code of practice sets out how employees of a company act. though it is not legally binding, the purpose is to stop employees behaving in unethical ways, ensuring the creator of a piece of content behaves according to ethical standards. For example the BBC has a commissioning code of practice that sets out the principles by which they should abide when commissioning work from independent production companies.
TV and film companies will also have a number of policies and procedures in place to maintain and encourage ethical practice. These can relate to business conduct, recruitment, employment and records management. They are often informed by legislation such as health and safety and equal opportunities laws. One of the most interesting policies is the BBC’s on advertising. It states that advertising is not allowed in order to keep the channel free from commercial pressures. This means they can truly serve the public without having to make profits or have their schedules and programming dictated by external pressure. They also have a policy on the safeguarding of children that they work with in their programmes and also a watershed policy that ensures certain subjects, matters, issues and images are not on the channel before 9pm.
Legal
Legal obligations are set in place by the government and must be followed by in order for TV and film companies to stay on the right side of the law. There are a number of acts and regulatory bodies that are relevant to the TV and film industries.
The Obscene Publications Act of 1959 and later amendments is an incredibly difficult and subjective law to enforce. The intention of the Act is to stop material that could deprave or corrupt people from being published or broadcast. Extreme images of torture, bestiality or necrophilia would most likely be classed as obscene and it would therefore be illegal to broadcast them.
The Race Relations Act of 1976 The amendments to the act were put in place to ensure that racial discrimination would not be tolerated and respect and tolerance should be promoted between racial groups. Most recently the Act was amended to ensure public bodies promote racial equality and in terms of broadcasting, it ensured that racial discrimination or hatred was not allowed to be practised.
