My wife manages a large group. Like, in the dozens. Quite a few of the team members are Indian-born.
She receives regular complaints from employees about being treated poorly by higher-caste members of the team. Oddly, the non-Indian descent members of the team are treated just fine, apparently.
She’s spoken to HR about what to do. They’ve said provide comfort, but anything you do to try and rectify the situation will only make it worse, and is potentially going to be called racism.
I was gonna go the other way. It is selection bias because none of the vegans I know want me to know it (except when I ask if inviting them over for a meal) and none exude any auro of superiority. The only stereotypical vegan I ever met was perhaps in college. The rest (and I know dozens), don’t give a shit what you eat.
Great example of how HR’s job is to protect the company, not the employees who work for it.
No kidding. I’m just surprised that the advice from HR was not “Just quit if you’re going to cause trouble.”
Depending on how well those employees document their interactions and which city/state this company is in, that’s potentially an expensive lawsuit.
That HR department isn’t very good at protecting their jobs or their company if their advice is “do nothing and hope for the best”. At the very least they need to send out the usual harassment/discrimination reminder and potentially need to check if there’s anything that exposes them to legal action, e.g. high performers not getting raises or promotions while others do, certain people but not others left out of group activities, etc.
My brother’s company has had endless issues with this (about 90% of the IT workforce is of South Asian descent) and bizarrely trying to clamp down on caste exclusion is considered anti-Indian racism by a lot of Indian Americans. There will be people three levels down from him in the organization who will not sit in a chair he has sat in or be in a small meeting room with him.
They use the logic that they have allowed Muslim women to refuse to sit with strange men behind closed doors, so…
I’m sure I’ll offend an HR employee with this, but it’s been my typical experience.
At a company I used to work, about 1100 employees, a close friend was the Sr. Director of IT (so highest level in that department). One of his low level techs was a pretty woman. The PRESIDENT OF THE COMPANY would put in frivolous tickets and demand that this woman be her tech. He’d then hover over her while she worked.
She came to my friend in tears, who naturally went to HR. HR’s response? Send someone else and tell the president she’s not in today; there was nothing they could do (to be fair, probably true).
My friend ended up telling her in confidence that he’d give her a stellar reference if she wanted to leave, which given the number of levels between them turned out to be a big help.
That was my reaction, that this is one awful HR department, protecting neither the company nor the aggrieved. Perhaps I’m ignorant of the nuances of such situations relative to U.S. law, but this cries hostile work environment to me. “Our culture encourages us to treat certain people like shit” doesn’t seem like a great defense to such a claim.
I don’t disagree with the principle at all.
But remember when CA wanted to outlaw caste discrimination, there was a significant portion of the Indian community (sorry if that’s not precise enough, but I really don’t know a lot about who participates in caste systems) who called it racist.
I think the HR department is worried that if they address it, the perpetrators will turn it back around and call it stereotyping. But that’s just my guess, as I’m not them.
The first part is almost certainly true.
But the latter part is where, if they really are worried about protecting the company (and themselves), they absolutely need to CYA. And that means making sure there aren’t grounds for filing suit in other ways. An employee being harassed by other employees does not necessarily need to provide an explanation for why they are being harassed. It is often sufficient to show it is happening and that the company was aware and did nothing. And that’s where the company (and its HR department) can really get into some trouble.
So if they were competent at all, they’d make absolutely sure the harassed employees did not have any records that could incriminate or at least intimate the company in the behavior.
well, guess who pays their wages
Speaking of Ramaswamy, he now says he wants Elmo to be his running mate so the deep state won’t try to kill him.
“Tech Bro Wondertwin Powers Activate!”
“Form of an ass!”
“Form of a poop emoji!”
Republicans are convinced that business people make good politicians. Maybe Musk could do for the country some of the wonderful things he’s done for twitter.
(Is he even eligible?)
As eligible as Cenk Uygur
Remember the good old days when nobody running for the highest office in the United States who uttered the phrase “deep state” or spouted wild assassination conspiracies would be taken seriously? You know, when people like Lyndon LaRouche were laughed at, not serious contenders running for a second term? When that conspiracy addled jackass claiming the felony charges he was facing was a politically motivated witch-hunt was able to garner a grand total of 25,562 votes in the 1988 presidential election?
Yeah, I miss those days.
Say, I wonder if Uygur is really ineligible. Maybe I’ll start a thread.
If you wanted to make a Voltron, who else would you invite?
I know you write in jest, but that just ain’t right
Uh-oh. Looks like someone with an R next to their name might have some issues with Elmo’s vision.
Stay classy, TFG. Nothing says presidential material like a Christmas message wishing everyone you don’t like to ROT IN HELL.