California IT companies increasing awareness about caste based discrimination

16 Aug 2022 , 01:04 PM

Apple is emerging as an early leader in plans to free Silicon Valley of a strict hierarchy that has separated Indians for years. America’s tech titans are getting a modern-day crash course on India’s historic caste system.

The largest publicly traded business in the world, Apple, revised its general employee behavior code around two years ago to specifically forbid discrimination based on caste, adding caste to the list of categories already in place, including race, religion, gender, age, and ancestry.
It goes above US discrimination statutes, which do not specifically forbid casteism, to include the new category, which has not before been recorded.

The revision followed a wake-up call for the tech industry, which relies heavily on skilled immigrants from India, in June 2020, when California’s employment regulator filed a lawsuit against Cisco Systems on behalf of a low-caste engineer who claimed that two higher-caste bosses were obstructing his career.

Because caste is not a legally “protected class” in California, Cisco, which denies wrongdoing, claims that an internal investigation found no evidence of prejudice and that some of the charges are unfounded. A court lawsuit might start as early as next year after an appeals tribunal rejected the networking company’s request to have the dispute submitted to private arbitration this month.