An Australian public servant has revealed that Indian managers at a federal agency are only hiring other Indians, sparking a flood of similar complaints.
The Public Service worker said in a post on Reddit this week that they were pro-diversity, but that Indians dominating hiring was having the opposite effect.
“I really don’t want to sound racist but I’m currently working for a federal agency,” the post read.
“Over the last year our team of analysts got broken into silos and every manager of those silos is now Indian. Since then, the only new hires have been Indian from every single silo.
“I really have nothing against people that are not of my ethnicity, but previously we had complete diversity in the new hires in our team, from all over the world. East Asian, European (as in someone born in Europe, not white Australian), central Asian and South American.
“I know this sounds like crackpot One Nation nonsense, and I’m a big believer in diversity but this is really not feeling very diverse.”
The post has since been censored but generated hundreds of responses before it was removed, with many other Aussies saying they had experienced the same thing at their own workplaces.
“I work in a federal government department and there is a team of seven Indian women, which is managed by an Indian woman. The odds of all these Indian women being the most suitable for the job over all other candidates is impossibly high, but nobody can say anything,” one comment read.
“I have spent many years in supermarkets and have experienced the same issue happening there. Once there is an Indian department manager they almost exclusively hire only other Indians,” said another.
“Having to do the mandatory learning every six months about how we should be inclusive to all cultures in the work force, and then you sit down to lunch with your colleagues and they all speak in Hindi so you can’t even participate in conversation is one memory from working in tech at a bank that I won’t forget,” another wrote.
“Stuff like this puts One Nation in power. Our government should never have accepted the number of migrants from one country that they did.”
But some argued that Indians were underrepresented in upper management, or claimed the phenomenon was not due to in-group hiring but caused by high turnover and large numbers of Indian applicants.
“To be honest: every agency that I’ve worked at in the past few years with a heavy “service delivery” focus – such as Services Australia – had a predominantly Indian staff,” a public service worker wrote.
“My understanding is that the IT-focused agencies are similar. From my perspective, tons of Indian people are applying for these jobs (which are largely entry level), and once inside the agency are encouraging their family members to apply.
“I don’t think there are any Indian hiring managers hiring exclusively Indian staff, it’s purely a sheer weight of numbers thing with the applications.”
Header image credit: Pexels.
