Legal and Ethical Obligations

Legal and Ethical Obligations

Employment legislation covers laws and standards that make sure that employees do not suffer from dangerous or unhealthy working environments or practices. Employment legislation has a number of various different parts. Health and safety ensure a safe and healthy working environment. The BBC for example has strict policies regarding reporting an accident or incident, guidelines for health and safety, a risk assessment procedure and a strict security policy. Employees will be expected to abide by these rules and they know the policies in order to help the BBC make sure the working environment is safe and continues to be consistently safe. On the BBC website, all these policies can be found on the page and there is even a separate section for freelancers within the company who are unlikely to be familiar with the policies as full time employees.

Most media industry employers 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 by their law. This law is against this type of discrimination but some employers will be better at providing equal opportunities than others. Channels 4 are known to even go 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 was recently publicly 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.’ This caused backlash amongst the media world.

Employers must get insurance in order to cover themselves, should they be liable to pay compensation to an employee who has become injured or fallen 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.