As thousands of attendees in blazers and lanyards streamed through the giant iridescent rainbow marking the entrance to Dreamforce Tuesday morning, a group of about 100 protestors gathered at the corner of Howard and Fourth Streets banging drums and holding picket signs that read “Salesforce: Sign the democracy pledge” and “NO ICE NO FEAR.”
“Salesforce, you’re hella whack until you kill that ICE contract!” Darius Mirshahi, a union organizer from SEIU United Service Workers West and one of the protest leaders, chanted into a megaphone.
SEIU-USWW, a union that represents security officers nationwide, was only one of the organizers of the rally, which aimed to call the attention of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to a number of loosely connected demands, including canceling Salesforce’s contracts with ICE, supporting security workers as they prepare to strike this Friday amid tense negotiations with contracting companies, and “defend democracy” by signing a democracy pledge.
Mitra Zarinebaf, a communications manager at activist network Bay Resistance, the organizer of the democracy pledge, said the protest was targeting Benioff because she believes “he’s amenable” to supporting progressive causes.
“He’s done progressive things for San Francisco in the past,” she said, citing Benioff’s public support for Proposition C, a business tax that passed in 2018 that funds city homelessness services, and his ongoing donations to SFUSD.
“We also know he has sway with Trump,” she added.
Last October, after Donald Trump announced he planned to send the national guard to San Francisco, Benioff initially supported the president but quickly walked back his statements after widespread backlash, writing on X that he “listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials… I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco.” A week later, Trump called off his plan to deploy troops to the Bay.
For years, Benioff was positioned as one of the most politically progressive tech executives, but that reputation has shifted rightward in recent years, along with the tech industry as a whole.
Last year, the New York Times reported that Salesforce has pitched its software to ICE, proposing the federal agency specifically use its AI tools for “talent acquisition…to triple its workforce by hiring 10,000 new officers and agents expeditiously.” Then in February, Benioff made a joke about deporting international employees at an internal Salesforce event in Las Vegas, prompting more than 1,400 Salesforce employees to sign a letter demanding their employer cancel any potential business with ICE. Whether Salesforce did so is unclear.
Zarinebaf said she had not heard about the Las Vegas incident; still, she hopes Benioff will use his influence to support democracy and progressive causes.
Sarah, a nonprofit worker who declined to share her last name, stopped by the protest before attending the annual sales conference. Like Zarinebaf, she believes the Salesforce chief is still a progressive at heart.
“I think Marc Benioff wants to do the right thing. I think he cares about people. Salesforce has done a lot to be really inclusive,” she said. “But when they are providing software that enables ICE to do what they do, it feels like they don’t share my values.”
Among the thousands of Dreamforce attendees entering the Moscone Center in droves Tuesday morning, Sarah was one of the only ones who stopped by the protest. Nancy Latham, one protestor who had spent the morning handing out flyers, estimated that only about 10 percent of the attendees took them.
“My line is, ‘Do you want to stand up for democracy?’ and most people just say, ‘I’m okay,’ or ‘No, thanks,” Latham said. Later, she discovered opening with, “We’re asking Salesforce to stand up for its own values,” was much more effective.
After chanting, drumming, and marching in circles on the corner outside Yerba Buena Gardens for about two hours, the protestors marched away from the conference, down Mission Street toward Salesforce Tower around 10 a.m. At the same time, Benioff took the keynote stage inside Moscone South to kick off the conference.
