ermingarden: medieval image of a bird with a tonsured human head and monastic hood (Default)
Ermingarden ([personal profile] ermingarden) wrote in [community profile] agonyaunt2023-03-02 11:09 am
Entry tags:

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.
lilysea: Serious (Default)

[personal profile] lilysea 2023-03-02 05:18 pm (UTC)(link)
fingerprinting for the church choir seems really odd to me -

was that part of a Working With Children check?
lilysea: Serious (Default)

[personal profile] lilysea 2023-03-02 05:31 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
conuly: (Default)

[personal profile] conuly 2023-03-02 08:32 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)

[personal profile] melannen 2023-03-02 05:49 pm (UTC)(link)
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.)
ashbet: (Default)

[personal profile] ashbet 2023-03-02 06:00 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)

[personal profile] melannen 2023-03-02 06:41 pm (UTC)(link)
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?
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)

[personal profile] melannen 2023-03-02 11:06 pm (UTC)(link)
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.)
liv: cartoon of me with long plait, teapot and purple outfit (mini-me)

[personal profile] liv 2023-03-03 09:34 am (UTC)(link)
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.
p_cocincinus: (Default)

[personal profile] p_cocincinus 2023-03-03 05:59 am (UTC)(link)
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.
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)

[personal profile] oursin 2023-03-02 07:30 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
shanaqui: Hythlodaeus from FFXIV. Lilac-haired guy looking away with a butterfly on his finger. ((Hythlodaeus) Butterfly)

[personal profile] shanaqui 2023-03-03 12:34 am (UTC)(link)

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?

ethelmay: (Default)

[personal profile] ethelmay 2023-03-03 01:56 am (UTC)(link)
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?
edenfalling: stylized black-and-white line art of a sunset over water (Default)

[personal profile] edenfalling 2023-03-03 03:27 am (UTC)(link)
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.
shanaqui: Hythlodaeus from FFXIV. Lilac haired guy in black robes, holding a bow. ((Hythlodaeus) Arrow)

[personal profile] shanaqui 2023-03-03 09:28 am (UTC)(link)
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.