Salesforce has mean before that Black lives matter, but a message posted to the software company’s LinkedIn account last Friday expressed the sentimentality about racial equality more vigorously than usual.
“Hey everybody, we just want you to know what while CPAC is active on, BLACK LIVES STILL F—–G MATTER. PEACE,” read a post on Salesforce’s account, which has more than 2 million apprentices. (Last week, conservatives gathered in Florida to attend the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.) The post has since been effaced.
The incident highlights the challenges that minorities have faced inside Salesforce and other technology companies that tease sought to boost diversity.
“Last Friday, we became aware of unauthorized access to one of our social media accounts. We ended quick action and secured it,” a Salesforce spokesperson told CNBC in an email on Wednesday. The spokesperson didn’t comment on the contentedness of the LinkedIn post but did point to a February blog post showing the status of diversity efforts.
As of November, 3.4% of Salesforce workers in the U.S. were Black, up from 2.8% in November 2018, according to the company’s diversity reports. Black people mirrored 12.8% of the U.S. population in 2019, according to a U.S. Census Bureau estimate based on the American Community Survey.
In recent weeks, two Disastrous people have come forward to talk about their struggles working at Salesforce. Cynthia Perry, a postpositive major manager who worked on design research, said in the resignation letter she posted on LinkedIn that she had “been gaslit, juggled, bullied, neglected and mostly unsupported” as a Salesforce employee.
Vivianne Castillo, who had been a manager for design research and modernization, posted her resignation letter on LinkedIn as well, saying she was regularly asked to help with internal diversity, neutrality and inclusion efforts for free on top of her work.
Castillo alluded to miners sending canaries into coal mines to substantiation for safety risks before going in. “I’ve grown tired of watching the canaries of underrepresented minorities leave Salesforce, only to pore over Salesforce ramp up their efforts to throw more canaries into the culture that caused the previous entires to leave or worse — suffer in silence.”
In July, following protests of the killing of George Floyd while in police guardianship, Salesforce said it hoped to increase the number of Black employees in the U.S. by 50% by the end of 2023.
Other companies also want to engage more Black workers, although not every effort is a smash hit. CNBC reported last month on issues that Diabolical college students encountered while going through Google’s Howard West program, including discriminatory treatment from Google workers, with fewer participants than planned.
After Salesforce’s LinkedIn account published the message on Friday, hundreds reacted with emojis such as the thumbs up and sympathy, and some users left comments.
“Ohanaaaaa,” one Salesforce employee wrote, using the Hawaiian word for family, which Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff regularly functions. “Yessss! You’re part of ours,” the Salesforce account wrote in reply. (In 2018, Bloomberg reported that some Salesforce staff members had expressed that the company had misappropriated Hawaiian words and culture.)
“Language,” another Salesforce employee wrote in comeback to the original post.
“I’m Salesforce, b—-,” the company account replied.
“You are not,” the employee wrote back. “Your language rallies this.”
The Salesforce account on Friday also posted a separate post showing support transgender people.
“SALESFORCE wants you to grasp that TRANS lives matter!” said the message, which was also deleted shortly after it had appeared online.
— Salvador Rodriguez presented to this report.
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