June 9: The issue of caste discrimination at Google burst out in the open earlier this month, when The Washington Post reported the company had canceled a scheduled talk by Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the founder and executive director of Equality Labs — a nonprofit that advocates for Dalits. She had even appealed to CEO Sundar Pichai, but the talk, to coincide with Dalit History Month, didn’t materialize.

Later, Tanuja Gupta, a senior manager at Google News who invited Soundararajan to speak, resigned over the incident, reported the Post.

“Soundararajan — who has given talks on caste at Microsoft, Salesforce, Airbnb, Netflix, and Adobe — said Equality Labs began receiving speaking invitations from tech companies in the wake of the George Floyd protests. Most institutions wouldn’t do what Google did. It’s absurd. The bigoted don’t get to set the pace of conversations about civil rights,” she said.: The Washington Post.

“In Gupta’s goodbye email, she questioned whether Google wanted its diversity efforts to succeed. “Retaliation is a normalized Google practice to handle internal criticism, and women take the hit,” she wrote. Gupta was one of the organizers behind the 2018 Google Walkout, in which 20,000 Google employees around the world briefly walked out of their offices to protest the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment. The other six organizers have already left the company,” the Post report said.

Google defended their action by saying through a spokesperson: “We also made the decision to not move forward with the proposed talk which — rather than bringing our community together and raising awareness — was creating division and rancor.”

Now, the Alphabet Workers Union-Communications Workers of America have come out against caste discrimination at Google.

“Alphabet Workers Union-Communications Workers of America stands in support of Thenmozhi Soundararajan (Dalit civil-rights scholar and executive director of Equality Labs) and Tanuja Gupta (senior PgM at Google). Thenmozhi Soundararajan was deplatformed by discriminatory and casteist disinformation at Alphabet and Tanuja Gupta was retaliated against (leading to her resignation) for wanting to further the cause of caste equity at the workplace,” the union said in a statement.

Saying that “caste is a system of oppression and is rampant throughout many American institutions”, the union added: “Tech workers around the world are speaking up about casteism and hostile workplaces. Alphabet, on the other hand, has created a hostile work environment for caste-oppressed workers and allies. In an email to over 15,000 Alphabet workers, Gupta shared a disturbing series of events that led to her leaving the company. As reported in the Washington Post, Gupta said, “Retaliation is a normalized Google practice to handle internal criticism, and women take the hit.” Alphabet not only failed its civil rights obligations to create a safe workplace, but also chose to target women of color leaders like Tanuja and Thenmozhi instead of addressing its caste discrimination problem.”

The union also appealed to discriminated workers to speak up: “If you are an Alphabet worker in any location and are impacted by or witness to caste-based discrimination, you can reach out to us at contact@alphabetworkersunion.org”