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Caste
[ch 7: pages 196-197]For some time, governments have been promising new laws to ban caste discrimination, which affects approximately 400,000 people in the UK. Caste is a hereditary division rooted in Hindu society, based on factors such as wealth, rank or occupation.
A power to ban caste discrimination was included in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, requiring the Secretary of State to consult and then issue an Order amending the definition of “race” in the EA 10 to include caste. This Order has not yet been made.
In the meantime, in Chandhok v Tirkey [2014] UKEAT/0190/14/KN, the EAT confirmed that caste discrimination is already covered by the EA 10, as long as it is part of an existing protected characteristic. This will usually be “ethnic origin”. Someone’s caste is likely to be part of their ethnic origin where it is based on descent, or contains an identifiable ethnic identity. The case proceeded to a full hearing before the Cambridge Employment Tribunal in September 2015:
The tribunal upheld a claim by Ms Tirkey for race discrimination. The tribunal treated caste as an aspect of race (her inherited status). Tirkey was a member of the Adivasi caste, described as the lowest class in the “caste pyramid”. She self-identified as belonging to the “servant class”. Tirkey, who could not speak English, was recruited from India to work as a domestic servant for the Chandhoks. She worked 18 hour days, seven days a week for four and a half years for 11p an hour, cooking, cleaning and looking after their children, sleeping on a foam mattress on the floor. Her passport was seized and she was prevented from having her Bible, attending church or calling her family.
The tribunal ruled that the conditions in which she was forced to live were a violation of her dignity and that she was a victim of both racial harassment and religious discrimination. Nobody based in the UK would have accepted these conditions of work, it concluded. Her employers were ordered to pay £183,773, which was the amount Tirkey would have earned had she been paid the national minimum wage.
Tirkey v Chandhok, 2015, unreported (source: BBC website, 2 September 2015)