In an unusual situation of discrimination by caste, the point out of California has alleged two managers at Cisco Methods harassed a fellow Indian-American worker due to the fact he comes from the most affordable social group in India’s caste procedure.
The suit submitted on Tuesday by California’s Division of Reasonable Employment and Housing (DFEH) also names Cisco as a defendant, claiming the networking equipment big failed to reduce the alleged harassment of an engineer recognized only as John Doe or tackle the problem of caste-based discrimination in its workforce.
“For many years, related to Doe’s crew, Cisco’s complex workforce has been — and continues to be — predominantly South Asian Indian,” the DFEH reported in its complaint, noting that a lot more than 70% of Cisco’s H1-B visa workers arrive from India.
U.S. employment law does not precisely bar caste-based discrimination but the DFEH contends Cisco subjected Doe to “disparate terms and situations of employment based on his faith, ancestry, national origin/ethnicity, and race/color.”
“It is unacceptable for workplace situations and prospects to be determined by a hereditary social standing determined by beginning,” DFEH Director Kevin Kish reported in a news launch. “Employers must be organized to reduce, treatment, and deter illegal perform versus workers due to the fact of caste.”
In accordance to the DFEH, Doe was born at the base of India’s caste hierarchy as a Dalit, after termed “untouchables.” As a principal engineer at Cisco, he has labored with a crew of solely Indian employees, all of whom, other than for him, are from better castes.
As beneficiaries of the caste procedure, Doe’s better caste supervisors Sundar Iyer and Ramana Kompella and co-workers allegedly “imported the discriminatory system’s tactics into their crew and Cisco’s workplace.”
“Doe was envisioned to settle for a caste hierarchy in the workplace where Doe held the most affordable standing in the crew and, as a final result, obtained much less spend, less prospects, and other inferior terms and situations of employment,” the suit suggests.
The DFEH also promises Doe’s supervisors retaliated versus him when he “unexpectedly opposed the illegal tactics, opposite to the traditional buy concerning the Dalit and better castes.”
A 2018 survey by the civil rights group Equality Labs found that 67% of Dalits felt they were being dealt with unfairly at their U.S. workplaces.
