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California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste

reuters.com

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Re: California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste

#3

Post by duxup »

>At Cisco, the unnamed employee reported Iyer to human resources in November 2016 for outing him as a Dalit to colleagues. Iyer allegedly retaliated, but Cisco determined caste discrimination was not illegal and issues continued through 2018, the lawsuit states.

I wouldn't expect HR to side with the lower level employee as generally HR groups are there to protect the company.... but I would wonder what their findings were that found it wasn't illegal.

Re: California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste

#4

Post by hlieberman »

duxup wrote: post #3

>At Cisco, the unnamed employee reported Iyer to human resources in November 2016 for outing him as a Dalit to colleagues. Iyer allegedly retaliated, but Cisco determined caste discrimination was not illegal and issues continued through 2018, the lawsuit states. I wouldn't expect HR to side with the lower level employee as generally HR groups are there to protect the company.... but I would wonder what their findings…

This is the buried lede in the article: they didn't deny the allegations, simply determined that it wasn't illegal (!)

Re: California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste

#6

Post by NikkiA »

duxup wrote: post #3

>At Cisco, the unnamed employee reported Iyer to human resources in November 2016 for outing him as a Dalit to colleagues. Iyer allegedly retaliated, but Cisco determined caste discrimination was not illegal and issues continued through 2018, the lawsuit states. I wouldn't expect HR to side with the lower level employee as generally HR groups are there to protect the company.... but I would wonder what their findings…

I'm guessing they concluded that the employee's caste is neither race nor national origin.

But I'd expect the state to argue that discrimination against an indian caste is inherently national origin based discrimination since they're unlikely to treat any non-indian as they would a dalit, and even if they did they'd be then discriminating on the national identity of the non-indian (ie, treating non-dalit indians better) OR treating all other indians as bad as they'd treat the dalit indian (unlikely, since Iyer is indian)

Re: California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste

#8

Post by systemvoltage »

I don’t understand. If “caste” is something specific to country of India, and if it is not explicitly listed in US law; can the defendant just claim it to be a more generalized version discrimination? It’s like going to a barber shop and they won’t cut your hair because they discriminate based on your accent. It’s discrimination regardless even though it’s not explicitly listed in the law. As far as the US law is concerned, caste system of India is completely arbitrary just like the accent or the color of your clothes or whatever.

Re: California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste

#9

Post by js8 »

Maybe somebody can clarify this for me. It seems that there is a difference in American and European laws about discrimination, where U.S. has a concept of protected groups (i.e. they explicitly enumerate who is not to be discriminated), while EU has laws based on equality of the groups (or more generally, humans).

It seems to me that the American system is more antagonistic, in the sense it really prefers some groups (or classes) to another. And this causes more issues (and more resentment). Am I understanding this right?

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