Confronting an Ancient Indian Hierarchy, Apple and IBM Ban Discrimation By Caste

"Apple, the world's biggest listed company, updated its general employee conduct policy about two years ago to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of caste," reports Reuters, "which it added alongside existing categories such as race, religion, gender, age and ancestry. Apple has more than 165,000 full-time employees, the article points out, and "The inclusion of the new category, which hasn't been previously reported, goes beyond U.S. discrimination laws, which do not explicitly ban casteism."The update came after the tech sector - which counts India as its top source of skilled foreign workers - received a wake-up call in June 2020 when California's employment regulator sued Cisco Systems on behalf of a low-caste engineer who accused two higher-caste bosses of blocking his career.... Since the suit was filed, several activist and employee groups have begun seeking updated U.S. discrimination legislation - and have also called on tech companies to change their own policies to help fill the void and deter casteism.... Elsewhere in tech, IBM told Reuters that it added caste, which was already in India-specific policies, to its global discrimination rules after the Cisco lawsuit was filed, though it declined to give a specific date or a rationale. Meta, Amazon, and Google do not mention caste in internal polices, the article points out - but they all told Reuters it's already prohibited by their current policies against discrimination. And yet, "Over 1,600 Google workers demanded the addition of caste to the main workplace code of conduct worldwide in a petition, seen by Reuters, which they emailed to CEO Sundar Pichai last month and re-sent last week after no response."

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