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set out responsibilities and rights for both employees and employers. Employees are expected to carry out their work in a way that has regard to the safety of others. Employers are expected to abide by a range of requirements governing such aspects as providing safe machinery and equipment, carrying out regular health and safety checks, ensuring the training of employees in health and safety issues, and carrying out a risk assessment to assess the dangers of particular work activities. There are also specific regulations about the way in which potentially harmful substances should be used and stored. There are a number of requirements about the minimum temperature at work, and other aspects of working conditions.

Employees are expected to receive the terms and conditions of their work setting out when their work commences, what their main duties are, who they are accountable to, rates of pay, and other entitlements.

Equal Opportunities legislation sets out that all employees should receive the same pay and conditions for carrying out the same or broadly similar work. There are also laws against sexual, racial and disability discrimination.

The Minimum Wage Act sets out the Minimum Wage that workers can expect to receive which today is more than a ￡5 an hour. The Minimum Wage is regularly reviewed and will increase over time. There is also European Union requirements governing the maximum number of hours that workers will be expected to work in a typical week which is currently set at 48 hours.

Employers and employees are expected to meet minimum legal requirements for such areas as Health and Safety at Work, and minimum standards and conditions related to hours, and the treatment of people in the workplace. Along with rights for employees there are corresponding responsibilities such as the expectation to work in a safe way and to have regard for the safety of work colleagues.

(Times Newspapers Ltd and MBA Publishing Ltd, 2008)

2.7 Ethical issues caused by information technology

Ethics and the Information Revolution, De George (2003) describes his approach to the ethical questions he will discuss. He locates the issues within a common and universal framework of ethical norms. Murder, stealing and other such acts are generally inconsistent with societal norms across societies despite their cultural differences. Within a society, norms exist for many practices that bear certain similarities to new and emerging practices made possible by information technologies. This suggests a two-step method. First, when evaluating a new practices such as monitoring e-mail, one can use analogical reasoning from similar practices and norms; for example, opening and reading private correspondence.

He applies his method of analysis to the general system of IT taken as the basis for the information society. Here he argues that core values of an information-centric society are truthfulness, accuracy, information sharing, and trust. While important in other types of society (agricultural, industrial), these values take on greater role in an information economy, in contrast to punctuality, for example, which is critical in an assembly-line industrial economy.

Ruth Rikowski (2006) pointed out that computers are changing the face of the work scene. For some people, their jobs are becoming redundant or they have to play quite dif