US: Apple is emerged 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 behaviour 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.
Although caste is not a legally “protected class” in California, Cisco, while 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.
Big Tech has been forced to address a millennia-old structure where Indians’ social position has indeed been based on family lineage, from the top Brahmin “priestly” class to the Dalits, shunned as “untouchables,” and consigned to menial labour. The dispute is the first US employment lawsuit about alleged casteism.
