agonyaunt | Ask a Manager: My new job requires me to take an oath of allegiance

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Ask a Manager: My new job requires me to take an oath of allegiance

(#5 at the link.)

I am a PhD student graduating this summer, and I have just signed on to a fantastic job that I am really excited about. I’m moving from the east coast to California, where I will work for the University of California with my salary paid by a federal grant.

I received my onboarding paperwork today, and along with all the normal stuff, it included an “Oath of Allegiance.” I am required to sign it in front of a witness who is “legally authorized to administer oaths.” Here’s the full text:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.”

Am I right in thinking this is insane? On the one hand, it doesn’t bother me that much because I can’t see it ever coming into play. I definitely don’t have the type of job where I’m likely to encounter enemies, foreign and domestic, seeking harm to the constitutions of my state or country (and if they do I’m peacing out, thanks). But I feel weird about signing something this intense, and I don’t really want to. Can they legally require this as a condition of employment?

Yep, they can require it. In fact, it looks like all California state employees are required to take that oath, and all federal employees have one too.

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I'm bringing this one over here because I'd like to see what people here think of this – it seems so completely normal to me that I was surprised the LW was taken aback! But it's a little difficult for me to articulate, now that I think about it, why it's fine for a government to require an oath but totally bonkers for a private company to do so (although in that case the oath itself was also forty pages long and frankly bizarre).

Thinking about it some more, it's understandable that LW could be weirded out, considering that for LW's purposes, whether they're working at a state university or a private university presumably doesn't really affect what they're doing in their day-to-day – academia isn't what we traditionally think of as a classic "public service" job. I'm contrasting that with my job, for example, where a loyalty oath feels completely expected, because it's a job performing an inherently governmental function, as opposed to a situation where you just happen to be working for the government but could just as easily be working for a private employer.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

I've had to take an oath like that (but more intense) as both a poll worker and a census worker. I currently work at a library, and while iirc we never signed a formal oath, there have been several times I have spoken up to advocate for civil liberties things where having an oath like that to fall back on might have helped! (instead I just quoted the CEO's own vague public statements, which worked fairly well.)

I think working in a government job *is* fundamentally different in a way that matters, though. Working for the government you're paid by the taxes of the people as a whole, and you're part of an organization that (at least in theory!) has powers that public corporations don't have. If you're taking the people's money you should be willing to swear that you will serve the people's interest, as enshrined in the documents that define that. (Note that none of these oaths that I am aware of include swearing allegiance to any particular person in a position of authority - just the general principles.)

I guess in theory I don't think there's anything wrong *in principle* with a private corporation asking employees to swear to hold up certain abstract principles, although I admit it would feel weird. But a lot of professional organizations include some kind of oath as well; most health care workers, lawyers, engineers, etc. have already sworn an oath to uphold the standards of their profession.

Oh yes, I think that's exactly it! How you're bound to public welfare, since you're employed by the public/paid by taxes, even if the functions of the job could be the same at a private company. (And yes, allegiance to a particular person would be a whole other kettle of fish!!)

Yeah. I guess I do think there's a difference with taking grant money, because that's at least in theory more like being contracted to do a particular thing; you generally have to promise not to use the money for anything else anyway. And state universities idk, since these days you probably aren't being paid mostly by tax money anyway, and also I feel on vibes like some professions should be free to swear to higher causes than the state if they want to, even if they're paid by the people. (In fact we might be running into that in a big way soon with the AMA outright declaring that the physician's oath outranks state law.) But in *theory* for most government jobs I'm ok with an oath in that form (and if you're not willing to swear it on ethical grounds, fair, don't take the blood money anyway!)

Now if only someone would enforce that on national politicians' oaths of office...

I'm also a poll worker -- here's a 2020 video of my County exec administering the poll worker's oath!
https://news.yahoo.com/election-workers-pennsylvania-oath-164229777.html

It includes "support, obey, and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of this Commonwealth..." and I've never batted an eye at swearing it each election; what is working the polls if not supporting, obeying, and defending the Constitution, really?

I haven't been a poll worker since the year I caught a (non-covid) plague from it, but thank you for your service!

Yeah, that's one in particular where if you aren't willing to swear that oath, you shouldn't do the job, because really, upholding that oath is 100% of the job of a poll worker. (Plus, since you're temp workers brought on short-term, there's really not much else they can do.)

Census oath was surprisingly intense; it was also temp work where the main job was going door-to-door to interview people who hadn't turned in their paper forms, and being able to say I'd been sworn to secrecy and to work only in the interests of the Constitution was often actively useful.

And constitutional change (for the better or the worse) requires a large amount of societal buy-in; private corporate principles could be changed on a whim of the private corporate ownership without any oversight from the employees affected.

Also, the only "higher principle" most private corporations could ask people to swear to is "make the maximum money for our stockholders".

Huh.

I worked for the Australian Federal government (several different agencies) between 2003 and 2010, and at no point was I asked to take a loyalty oath...

...just a security clearance

and an introductory ethics for public servants course as part of routine intake to the first job

I don't think it's standard in the federal government generally, but election workers and census workers are sort of special cases. As are certain people working in the military, the executive, law enforcement and the court system (come to think of it, I'm currently under oath for my jury service) and postal workers.

But I would also believe that Australia generally is more likely to think that an ethics course is more useful than some kind of formal ceremony or oath. And they would be right.

I can still remember

"agency money spent should always be an EFFECTIVE and EFFICIENT use of government funds, and justifiable as such"

"never accept any gifts from members of the public/stakeholders if you can avoid doing so without causing offence. Any gift worth more than $25 must be formally reported."

"don't put anything in writing that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of a newspaper"

No, it’s standard for all federal employees to take an oath. I just had to retake mine more than a decade after hire because apparently they lost the paperwork or something.

I had to take the oath as an intern, even!

I am astonished this is still a thing! - there was an immense hoohah in 1973 when Jessica Mitford, by then a famed muck-raking journalist, was invited to teach a course at San Jose State University, and found that she would be required to take a loyalty oath and be fingerprinted. This did not sit well with her convictions, even though by then I think she'd left the Communist Party.

I'd never heard about any of that – what a wild ride! Thanks for the link!

I have to say, while I can understand her objection to being unexpectedly confronted with the loyalty oath, it seems odd to object to the fingerprinting? Perhaps this is just because I've been fingerprinted six times in the past ten years (five times for various government jobs, and once because I was in a church choir), but it seems like a very common and generally accepted requirement for a lot of jobs – but then, maybe that was different fifty years ago!

fingerprinting for the church choir seems really odd to me -

was that part of a Working With Children check?

It was the diocese being a little overzealous – they erred on the side of overinclusion and fingerprinted all parish volunteers, even those – like me – who didn't work with kids. It definitely was odd, and we all had a good laugh about it!

Edited 2023-03-02 17:20 (UTC)

I guess after all the horrific stories about Catholic priests and Anglican priests abusing children, I can see why they would want to avoid anything like that happening again.

Absolutely! And I think it was better for the diocese to make a blanket policy that all volunteers had to be fingerprinted than to try to distinguish the risk factors for different volunteer roles.

It'd be better if more churches took that stance, instead of apparently deciding to assume it's only those wacky Catholics and *they* are True Christians whose pastors would never do such a thing.

I actually find over-fingerprinting creepier, because it's a way of tracking people that's bound up in the carceral system. If you're not doing something where a certain criminal history is a clear and present danger related to the job, they don't need your prints!

And of course it most often matters for jobs where it shouldn't matter; your insider trading record won't stop you making a high salary in finance and your police misconduct record won't stop you from getting law enforcement jobs, but God forbid you have an old drug conviction and want to be a school janitor.

And while it's certainly valid to want to keep sex offenders out of positions where they're given easy opportunity to reoffend, fingerprinting is probably necessary right now, the current way sex offenders are recorded and prosecuted isn't very good at that. (And financial fraud and police misconduct both have higher reoffense rates anyway.)

I am creeped-out by routine fingerprinting — I did it voluntarily when I was applying for a position that was explicitly working with abused children, but I don’t want to be printed (and thus in the criminal-justice system) for, say, a secretarial job.

I spent years working in government contract law (and, later, worked for a govt contractor), but never had to take an oath — I did have a minimal interview for my boss’ security clearance at one point, though.

Exactly.

It feels particularly wrong for a church - yeah, if you're going to be in a specific position of trust with other people's children, fine. But if you can't go to a Christian church to get a second chance after having messed up, what even is a Christian church for?

It wasn't required in order to attend the church! Just as a volunteer. And a past conviction for drug possession, for example, wouldn't have raised a red flag in this situation.

Respectfully, taking measures to protect vulnerable members of a community isn't in conflict with spiritual values of forgiveness and unconditional love. And being too quick to brush something under the rug as soon as someone says they've changed is part of what made child sexual abuse so widespread in the Church.

That's true, it's a tough call! But does protecting vulnerable members of the community really require that other members of the church know about a choir member's past drug conviction? Or really, even about a choir member's name on a list of sex offenders, if they aren't going to be supervising young people?

There are definitely fingerprint-included background checks where the organization asks about only very specific things and doesn't hear back if anything else comes up. My church does those for Sunday school teachers, pastors, and adult nursery volunteers. But even those have a really steep chilling effect on the kind of people who are disproportionately likely to have unjust criminal records, whether they would pull up those records or not. You might want to scare them out of being Sunday School teachers, but do you need to scare them out of working on the garden? They also need to have a way exist as people in the world.

My church also works heavily with prison and homeless ministries on the ground level and almost always has at least one or two volunteers or part-time employees or partner workers who would not pass a standard check. You could say that with those people you will do the checks but leave the option to make a judgement call - but if you're overriding them at will, what are you getting from them that's worth the chilling effect?

Certainly run relevant checks on the people who are going to be trusted alone with other people's children, and the people who are going to be the authority figures that other people would bring reports of problems to. But there are absolutely middle grounds between "quickly brush it entirely under the rug" and "mark someone as unfixably bad and untrustworthy because they are on a government list". In fact, the acceptance of the second is generally what leads to the first, because if middle grounds aren't provided, people will generally choose "nothing really happened" over "this is a Bad Person we can't interact with anymore". And questions of how to balance protecting the community with providing support to everyone who needs it is always a struggle, but it's really deep down inherently what Christian doctrine is about struggling with! Christian communities *should* struggle with this, it's when they stop struggling and think they know that they go wrong.

(Also, seriously, sex offender listings like show up in those checks are really, really bad at filtering out the people who are a danger to your kids. If *all* you're doing is a fingerprint check, you're not protecting your community, you're protecting your own ass. The people who are a real danger to your kids are the ones who haven't made it onto the lists, and most of the things that get you on the lists aren't directly correlated with committing in-person crimes against actual children.)

It absolutely doesn't "require that other members of the church know about a choir member's past drug conviction" or presence on the sex offender registry! None of this was, or should be, made public. I wasn't at all involved in the administration side of this – which was done at the diocesan level, not the parish level – but to my knowledge nothing was widely disseminated.

I also want to note that we've been discussing this in the context of background checks, but I don't think that was the sole purpose behind getting fingerprints. Fingerprints certainly aren't necessary for sex offender registries: I don't know off the top of my head how the CA registry works, but here in NY, the list of level 2 and 3 sex offenders (the higher levels) is publicly available online, and for level 1 offenders you call a hotline and provide a name and other piece of identifying information (e.g., driver's license number, SSN, birthdate) to check if someone is on the list; I expect the system in CA is similar. True, a fingerprint check might turn up an arrest that didn't lead to a conviction, or someone might be using a fake name, but I think a major rationale for the general fingerprinting requirement was proactive rather than retrospective and aimed at having evidence in case a volunteer committed a crime in the future.

I agree that sex offender registries not being differentiated based on whether a person's victim was a child or an adult results in some people being subject to restrictions (e.g., not being able to live near schools) that really don't need to apply to them. But that's not a problem I expect anyone will be dedicating administrative resources to in the foreseeable future – sex offenders, even if their victims were all adults, aren't exactly the most sympathetic constituency.

mark someone as unfixably bad and untrustworthy – I do think those are two very different things.

[cut for non-graphic discussion of child sexual abuse]

As an example, I worked on a case a couple of years ago against a woman who had sexually abused her children for over a decade. Now, I don't believe anyone is truly irredeemable. I hope she someday repents of what she's done and becomes a better person; I regularly pray for her. But no matter how she changes, I would never – not if a hundred years had passed without evidence of reoffending since she were released from prison – trust her to be left alone with a child. Even if I truly believed she was no longer dangerous! I would't trust my own assessment enough to take that risk.

This is a really good point: if you are going to do background checks you have to be willing to enforce them when they come up positive. If someone has a past conviction involving harm to children, they certainly can't do a role that involves contact with children. But if someone has a basically irrelevant criminal record (which might be about a crime they actually committed, or an unjust one), then you're absolutely right that orgs shouldn't just exclude them from all possible interactions. Exist as people in the world is a great phrasing!

When I worked in a medical school we asked for background checks, which was reasonable because our students had loads of patient contact and that would obviously include kids and vulnerable adults, it's not incidental, it's very much the core point of training to be a doctor. However, what actually happened was that a new student showed up who had a past stupid firearms rap. (I'm in the UK, it's illegal to use an unlicensed airgun to shoot squirrels, it's a very different legal context from having a constitutional right to mess around with all kinds of guns.)

Outcome: total meltdown. The fact that someone as a teenager had done something stupid and illegal didn't in any way make him unsuitable to be a doctor in his 30s. But the school were unconsciously assuming that the sort of people who apply to medical school are nice middle-class teenagers who don't get mixed up in that sort of thing, and when someone was admitted who didn't fit that profile, it turned out we had no procedure in place to handle it. Which was of no help in protecting anyone from potentially abusive doctors, and had a big chilling effect in blocking people from even applying to med school.

I had to be fingerprinted for my health insurance broker's license, and part of the process is answering a bunch of questions about whether you've been charged with a list of crimes that are largely about fianancial breaches of trust (embezzlement, forgery, etc). It's been two years since I looked at the list, but I'm pretty sure you could be an insurance broker who's been charged with assault but not with identity theft.

She was an Old School Leftie (even if by then ex-Commie), which was probably reason enough - was v involved in Civil Rights and so on.

Is getting fingerprinted that normal in the US that it's weird to not want to? I was so confused and weirded out by them demanding to fingerprint me when I entered the US from Canada for a three-day holiday (am a Brit, was a visitor to Canada too). Do you guys just... treat everyone as a criminal-in-waiting?

As I don't have a criminal record and don't expect to, I think of fingerprinting me as just an identity measure, and the modern world being what it is, my identity is pretty darned clear already to anyone who knows my name and a fact or two about me. So I might object to it as a general practice, but not care at all about being fingerprinted myself. Also, not that this is especially relevant, but it just occurred to me: do fingerprints that are sent in to be checked against a database of other fingerprints get entered into a criminal system? or do they just get tossed if there's no match?

I think they are saved, and then if you commit a crime later on, any fingerprints you leave at the scene can be matched to your record in the general database of "people whose fingerprints we have on file for whatever reason". But I'd have to look it up to be sure.

I asked. My fingerprints were kept and stored "for reference".

In the UK, we are rarely fingerprinted (I'm 33 and never have been except by US border control; I have no reason to expect to be), and the police are not permitted to retain the fingerprints of anyone who has not committed a crime.

As a UK-er, we don’t have (a) oaths or (b) fingerprinting as a standard thing for public sector jobs, so my eyes are in stalks here!

Quite. Long ago, in a job in the archives of a government department, I was obliged to sign the Official Secrets Acts - not communicating anything I learnt in the course of my employment etc etc: even though the definition of my job was actually making information about what was in the archives publicly available!

I'm from the Netherlands, and we also don't have this. Seems way over the top to me.

I'm a US fed and this seemed so routine to me that I was more surprised that the LW was surprised by it. Grant you, a state-level job seems a bit out of scope but without knowing more details, enh, maybe it's relevant? My agency works with sensitive data, though, so we have to be very careful about making sure everyone takes the responsibility to maintain privacy very seriously.

Of course, for a bit I was in a position involving new hire orientation and got to administer that oath. Of all the dozens and dozens of people I helped bring on board, I think there was one person who declined to take the oath and walked out when we got to that point.

I am also a California state employee so I had to take that oath, and I do remember side eyeing it a bit at the time, but I basically talked myself around to melannen's perspective on serving the public interest. I didn't have to get fingerprinted for the job, though (maybe now people do? It was more than two decades ago) but did for my California state ID (well, just thumbprinted but now I'm in that system), and it definitely made me more nervous than the loyalty oath.

Edited 2023-03-02 21:31 (UTC)

I had to get fingerprinted once for a job, but it was for an agency that provided assistants/caretakers to disabled people (and might have had some state funding? I don't remember exactly), so they wanted to be sure they weren't hiring people who would abuse their clients. That seemed reasonable to me under the circumstances!

I've never had to take any kind of loyalty oath, though now I'm wondering if my brother ever had to do that when he did contract/consultant work for the FBI as a language instructor...

I've had to do this for jobs at state universities. I was a little weirded out by it but nothing more. I might be a little more concerned about it now as an educator, depending on what state I was in, but not much more than just being an educator in those states period.

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Ask a Manager: My new job requires me to take an oath of allegiance

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