Nightmares at Christmas
OUT-LAW Radio, 14/12/2006
With Christmas music booming out of every shop speaker, we talk
to the people attempting to stop the rot, for employees' sakes,
including an Austrian union rep and a Lord.
A text transcription follows.
This transcript is for anyone with a hearing impairment or who
for any other reason cannot listen to the MP3 audio file.
The following is the text spoken by OUT-LAW journalist Matthew
Magee.
Hello and welcome to a special Christmas edition of OUT-LAW
Radio, the weekly podcast that keeps you up to date on all the news
in the constantly shifting legal world.
My name is Matthew Magee, and this week in an employment law
special we look at the world of Christmas shopping and ask whether
shop workers have any rights not to be subjected to a constant
trill of unchanging Christmas music as they work.
But first, the news.
- Information Commissioner names and shames newspapers
- Sites with message boards face strict US regulation
- Mobile prices could fall after new spectrum release
The Information Commissioner today named and shamed the
newspapers he says are breaking the law in their pursuit of
stories. Commissioner Richard Thomas has published a report to
Parliament on information theft which contains a league table of
alleged offenders.
His league table claims that the Daily Mail has used one raided
investigations agency more than any other paper. As well as tabloid
papers, broadsheets and magazines were represented on the list,
although list should not be taken as definitive, since it only
represents the usage ratios relating to one agency, it does show
how widespread the purchase of information is.
Six months ago Thomas signalled his intent to get tough on those
who trade in illegally obtained personal information.
The report, What Price Privacy Now?, is the Information
Commissioner's update to his original report, What Price Privacy?,
published in May. In that he outlined the market for information
and said he wanted sentences to increase and wanted individuals to
face jail sentences of up to two years for buying or selling
illegally obtained information.
Social networking sites and message boards face the same
regulatory burden as internet service providers (ISPs) in a new
Bill proposed by ex-US presidential candidate John McCain. McCain
wants sites to report all child pornography activity to
authorities.
Currently only ISPs have a duty to report suspected child
pornography-related activity to the US National Center for Missing
and Exploited Children. McCain's bill, though, extends that duty to
social networking sites, and to all sites that carry message
boards.
McCain's proposed law says that it applies to any "social
networking site, chat room, message board, or any other similar
service using the internet." It has been read twice by the senate
and must now be referred to a Committee for discussion. It also
says that convicted sex offenders in the US will have to register
their online identities with the authorities.
Mobile phone prices could fall once telecoms regulator Ofcom
sells three more chunks of spectrum. Ofcom has launched a
consultation on plans to release three spectrum bands which could
put new entrants in competition with existing 3g operators.
Orange, 3, T-mobile, Vodafone and O2 between them paid £22.5
billion for 3G licences in 2000 and networks have struggled to
recoup that investment. The new spectrum is likely to be sold off
at much lower prices.
Ofcom has said that the spectrum could be used for anything, but
has identified the four most likely uses: 3G mobile phone
telephony; wireless broadband using the still-developing Wimax
standards; mobile television broadcasts to handsets, and special
one-off uses, such as event communication or video
transmission.
That was this week's OUT-LAW News.
As you drift around the shops this Christmas in a panicky haze
stop for a moment and open your ears. It may not be the puzzle of
what colour of twinset to buy Auntie Mabel that has you tuned out
like a squirrel on elephant tranquilisers, it may be something more
immediate, more visceral, and more insidious.
Christmas music.
Everywhere you go, in every tinselly nook and glittery cranny
there is a speaker tinkling familiar musical platitudes at you. But
at least you can leave the shop or go home. Pity the poor shop
workers. OUT-LAW does, and so conducted a special yuletide
investigation into whether or not shop workers have legal rights
not to be played the same tired old Christmas tape 10 hours a
day over and over for the six most stressful weeks of the year.
Paul Clarke from the shop workers' union USDAW says that this is
a serious issue.
"It's an issue that has been brought to our attention to our
network of reps and full-time officials and it's usually dealt with
informally within the stores. What we're basically saying to
managers is if Christmas carols are being played on the same CD
repeatedly that could clearly create an unhealthy working
environment for people.
Our first port of call would be our officials or reps talking to
managers and saying look the noise levels are unacceptable, or
we're sick of listening to Little Drummer Boy for the 15th time
today could we actually change the CD over?"
Anti-noise campaigners say that the effects can be dramatic. Val
Weedon is the national co-ordinator of the UK Noise
Association.
"If people don't want it and if they have a negative response to
it and if they're exposed to something continually the same songs
over and over again, it's no different to being tortured, it's the
same reaction, the body will react in the same way."
Nigel Rogers is the secretary of Pipedown, a pressure group
campaigning against piped music.
"Any noise can cause a whole range of physical and psychological
abnormalities. In physical terms it can mean raised blood pressure,
cortisone disbalance and also depression of the immune system, in
fact it generally makes you ill, it causes stress, which is not at
all surprising. It is a psychological thing as well at the same
time."
The sticking point is not the volume of music – which is
carefully regulated – but the fact that the same snippets are
played over and over again, which could have a psychological effect
on workers.
In the current legal environment a worker would have to prove
that the music had made them measurably sick. Catherine Barker is
an Employment Lawyer with Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind
OUT-LAW. She says that the legal barrier is high.
"If the incessant Christmas music does in fact make an employee
ill he or she may try to bring a claim in the civil courts for
personal injury. I think this would be quite difficult. To make out
a case the employee would need to show that the employer had
breached its duty of care to provide a safe working environment by
playing the music in the first place. The employee would also need
to show that his or her ill health was directly attributable to the
Christmas music, and not to any other cause. The biggest hurdle for
the employee would probably be to demonstrate that his or her
illness was reasonably foreseeable by the employer. This would
involve the employer being on some from of notice that the
particular employee had some vulnerability to Christmas music, the
ill health in question, or to both."
Though Clarke said that his union would support a worker's case
under existing law, the law itself is under attack. Weedon says
that her organisation is looking to have the legislation
changed.
"There are no regulations governing the playing of music in
shops, and that's unfortunate. Obviously as a campaign group,
that's something we are pressing for, we are asking Government to
investigate this particular area."
Another assault on the law comes from within the House of Lords.
Lord Beaumont of Whitely is a Green Party Peer who last year
proposed a law banning piped music in all sorts of public places,
from buses to hospital waiting rooms.
Beaumont's law got short shrift in the house but he says that he
received plenty of public support and plans a new law early in the
New Year specifically for hospitals and doctors' surgeries.
He says that music can cause distress, and that workers should
not be forced to hear the same music over and over again.
"It certainly has an adverse effect on me, it would drive me to
murder I would have thought. But I mean I'm not saying necessarily
that it would be physically harmful but it would be very annoying,
very distressing and something people shouldn't be made to put up
with. I think quite definitely that people who work in shops should
have certain rights not to have music permanently pumped into
them."
A law change may not be necessary, though, as Gottfried Rieser
discovered. Following a Czech shop worker walk out in previous
years over the issue he led the GPA, the Austrian shop workers'
union, in a campaign three years ago which he labelled the 'No
Carols in the Sausage Department' campaign. It was staggeringly
successful, with companies such as retailer Spar agreeing to limit
their playing of the tunes and press coverage all over the
world.
"When we started the campaign we wanted to change the reason
that playing of Christmas carols happened two months before
Christmas. It's not necessary we think.
The purpose of the problem, I cannot explain it very good in
English but I think it is a psychological problem. It's going to
the brain and to the heart. Do you know the company Spar? I had a
meeting with Mr Preksel he's the top of Spar in Austria, he told me
of course I am right the campaign was very, very successful and
this time he promised to me he won't play the music any more than
three weeks before Christmas."
The issue is a real one, and according to Pipedown's Rogers, not
one that shoppers themselves pay much attention to.
"Noise is often called the forgotten pollutant; I think piped
music is the forgotten aspect of noise."
But if Rieser's example is anything to go by, direct action and
negotiation between workers and management may yet make next
Christmas a more peaceful, stress-free time, like it is in
Austria.
"Today I have been in Vienna. We waited in different shops, and
there was no Christmas songs, no Carols. I am very proud about
it."
That's it for this week and this year. From all of us at OUT-LAW
have a very happy Christmas and a great New Year. We'll be back in
2007 with More news, features and interviews from the world of
technology law.
For now thanks for listening. Goodbye
OUT-LAW Radio was produced and presented by Matthew
Magee for international law firm Pinsent Masons.
