Corporate America Has a Caste System: Inside the Shadow Workforce

Send us Fan MailCorporate America runs on a caste system, and most of us were taught not to see it. Karen brings a question sparked by a LinkedIn essay from a South Asian woman who fled the caste system in India, then in Britain, only to feel it again inside American corporations. Jonelle, who held executive roles for years, resists the word at first, then walks straight into agreeing with it. Together, they map the two-tier workforce: full-time employees with benefits, stock, and a career path on one side, and a fast-growing shadow workforce of contractors on the other, the people who sit at the same desk doing the same job with a different color badge, no benefits, and no way up. They connect it to the 2025 DEI rollbacks, to Isabel Wilkerson's framework of caste as the worn grooves of unthinking expectation, and to the uncomfortable truth that the same companies cutting diversity programs are expanding a contractor class that is disproportionately Black and Latino. Karen names how white women get recruited to enforce patriarchal power, using Bari Weiss at CBS as the example. The episode lands on a fix: stop fighting for benefits for yourself, and start fighting for rights for all, because programs everyone can use are the ones no one can cut.CALLS TO ACTIONIf you have a full-time job that uses contractors, find out who on your team is classified as what and whether they have healthcare. Awareness leads to change.The next time a benefit or program is framed as helping only one group, ask how it could be designed as rights for all, the version that is much harder to cut.Notice one moment this week where you were asked to use your position to protect power instead of share it, and name it out loud, even just to yourself.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at [email protected] the show