Big Tech take a look at India's caste policies

OAKLAND, California : America's tech giants are taking a modern-day crash course in India's ancient caste system, with Apple emerging as an early leader in policies to rid Silicon Valley of a rigid hierarchy that has separated Indians for generations.

Apple, the world's biggest listed company, recently updated its employee conduct policy to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of caste, which it added to existing categories such as race, religion, gender, age, and ancestry.

The inclusion of the new category goes beyond the US's discrimination laws, which do not explicitly ban casteism, as a result of the inclusion of the new category.

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.

An internal investigation by Cisco found no evidence of discrimination, and that some of the allegations are baseless because caste is not a legal protected class in California, which is not a right to do any of the things it denies.

An appeals panel rejected the networking company's bid to push the case to private arbitration this month, meaning a public court case could come as early as next year.

The dispute over the first US employment lawsuit about alleged casteism has forced Big Tech to confront a millennia-old hierarchy where Indians have been based on family lineage, from the top Brahmin priestly class to the Dalits, shunned as untouchables and consigned to menial labour.

Since the suit was filed, several activist and employee groups have begun to seek updated U.S. discrimination legislation - and have also called for tech companies to change their policies to fill the void and deter casteism.

According to a Reuters review of policy in the US, which employs hundreds of thousands of workers from India, their efforts have produced patchy results.

Kevin Brown, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies caste issues, said that the policies would be inconsistent, because they're almost what you'd expect when the law is not clear, and cited uncertainty among executives over whether caste would make it into US statutes.

I could imagine that parts of an organisation are saying this makes sense, and other parts are saying we don't think taking a stance makes sense. Apple's internal policy on workplace conduct, which was seen by Reuters, added reference to caste in the equal employment opportunity and anti-harassment sections after September 2020.

Apple introduced language a couple of years ago to reinforce that we prohibit discrimination or harassment based on race. It added that training provided to staff explicitly mentions caste.

It said that our teams assess our policies, training, processes and resources on an ongoing basis to make sure they are comprehensive. We have a diverse and global team, and we are proud that our policies and actions reflect that. After the Cisco lawsuit was filed, IBM told Reuters it added caste, which was already in India-specific policies, to its global discrimination rules, though it did not give a specific date or a rationale.

The company said that IBM's only training that mentions caste is for managers in India.

Several companies do not specifically reference caste in their main global policy, including Amazon, Dell, Facebook owner Meta, Microsoft and Google. Some of the policies are only released internally to employees, according to a review by Reuters.

The companies all told Reuters that they have zero tolerance for caste prejudice and that they said such bias would fall under existing bans on discrimination by categories such as ancestry and national origin on policy.