May 24, 2025

The business lovers

Joseph B. Hash

Cisco Sued for Discrimination Based on Caste

In an abnormal circumstance of discrimination by caste, the condition of California has alleged two professionals at Cisco Units harassed a fellow Indian-American employee mainly because he arrives from the most affordable social team in India’s caste system.

The accommodate submitted on Tuesday by California’s Office of Good Employment and Housing (DFEH) also names Cisco as a defendant, proclaiming the networking gear huge unsuccessful to prevent the alleged harassment of an engineer discovered only as John Doe or deal with the difficulty of caste-based discrimination in its workforce.

“For many years, equivalent to Doe’s group, Cisco’s technical workforce has been — and carries on to be — predominantly South Asian Indian,” the DFEH claimed in its complaint, noting that much more than 70{ae9868201ea352e02dded42c9f03788806ac4deebecf3e725332939dc9b357ad} of Cisco’s H1-B visa personnel arrive from India.

U.S. employment legislation does not exclusively bar caste-based discrimination but the DFEH contends Cisco subjected Doe to “disparate conditions and disorders of employment based on his faith, ancestry, countrywide origin/ethnicity, and race/color.”

“It is unacceptable for place of work disorders and prospects to be determined by a hereditary social status determined by birth,” DFEH Director Kevin Kish claimed in a information release. “Employers ought to be well prepared to prevent, solution, and prevent illegal conduct in opposition to personnel mainly because of caste.”

In accordance to the DFEH, Doe was born at the bottom of India’s caste hierarchy as a Dalit, once identified as “untouchables.” As a principal engineer at Cisco, he has worked with a group of solely Indian workforce, all of whom, besides for him, are from increased castes.

As beneficiaries of the caste system, Doe’s increased caste supervisors Sundar Iyer and Ramana Kompella and co-personnel allegedly “imported the discriminatory system’s methods into their group and Cisco’s place of work.”

“Doe was anticipated to take a caste hierarchy inside the place of work wherever Doe held the most affordable status inside the group and, as a end result, gained fewer pay back, fewer prospects, and other inferior conditions and disorders of employment,” the accommodate claims.

The DFEH also promises Doe’s supervisors retaliated in opposition to him when he “unexpectedly opposed the illegal methods, contrary to the traditional order between the Dalit and increased castes.”

A 2018 study by the civil legal rights team Equality Labs uncovered that 67{ae9868201ea352e02dded42c9f03788806ac4deebecf3e725332939dc9b357ad} of Dalits felt they have been addressed unfairly at their U.S. workplaces.

caste system, Cisco Units, Dalit, employment discrimination, Lawsuit