Discussion 10 days ago (600+ comments):<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083</a> "California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste"
Interesting because this is not the first time I've heard that Indians in Cisco are extremely cliquey. Definitely remember hearing story of a workplace discrimination settlement from there. In that case it was argued in the gender angle, but the person involved said it's actually a group of Indians who were allegedly pulling all stops to promote each other while trying to exclude other Asians.<p>I'm from India, and can totally believe it. Have also heard of stories in Texas where they will keep a trusted Indian guy in interview panels to make sure that it's not a cousin or friend (who only barely looks like the interviewee) actually coming for the interview. And then there are these "consulting firms" who specialise in helping you fake a resume and get a job (most of the time these are people who won the H1 lottery and have come to the US via Infosys/TCS and are trying to switch to a real job instead of the half-pay serfdom they are in). These shenanigans are of course not common nowadays, but what this means is there's a big population of disingenuous Indian origin people in the second-grade tech jobs in the US, which does not bode well for the general image of Indian tech workers unfortunately.
This will be an interesting case because it will need to test how a construct like caste maps on to the protected classes of US anti discrimination law. There's plenty of overlap between caste and many US protected classes, including race, class, and religion, but there is not a tight fit to any of them.<p>Perhaps countries like the UK have more experience with this, because they have proportionally much larger and older Indian populations, and also the UK has its own historical hereditary caste like system.
"The suit alleges that Iyer told other workers the employee was Dalit and had gained entry into the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology through affirmative action."<p>Indian law explicitly requires a much lower standard of admission for the lower castes. Is it illegal to take consideration of this fact?
It's an interesting situation.<p>Discrimination based on something not common in one country can still have negative impacts.... but perhaps it hasn't been sorted out legally in our country yet?<p>We live in a strange global world.
shocking but still confused. When they practiced the indian caste system in the US, how would they interact with people not from india, e.g. people with US, EU, Vietnam, Korea etc background? Do they get treated as "high caste" or "low caste" people?
As a Hindu I'd like to take the opportunity to share that the implementation of the caste system is not based on what it really means to be Hindu. The Vedas state that one's caste is fluid (not based on lineage) and can change in one's lifetime, and that further a person of the worker class is not lesser than someone of the priest caste, they both perform dharma necessary for the community.