Over 1,400 Salesforce employees signed a letter last week demanding that CEO Marc Benioff cease business operations with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), sources told CNBC.

“We are deeply troubled by recent press reports describing Salesforce pitches of AI technology to [ICE] to help the agency ‘expeditiously’ hire 10,000 new agents and vet tip-line reports,” the letter said, according to CNBC. The letter was drafted after Benioff “joked” to international employees at a Salesforce leadership event in Las Vegas that “ICE agents were in the building monitoring them,” WIRED reported.

Benioff’s remark “landed in the context where immigration enforcement is not an abstract idea. There are some employees really living with it…as a risk, fear, or family impact, and that makes the ‘humor’ function sort of as a power signal, not a punch line,” Christine Haskell, managing director at advisory firm Dative.works and former senior director of data culture and literacy at Salesforce, told HR Brew.

“The CEO’s words set an emotional weather climate, and when the weather is threat adjacent, even in a joke, it tells employees that leadership is willing to treat that lightly,” Haskell said.

For more on what HR needs to know about Salesforce employees’ response to Benioff’s comment, keep reading here.—MC

If anyone could have predicted that the post-2020 focus on DEI would fade away, it was DEI practitioners.

DEI practitioners like Lily Zheng, fairness strategist and consultant. When Zheng started DEI consulting in the late 2010s, their work focused on helping companies move beyond one-off, 60-minute learning and development sessions and toward long-term DEI strategies. In their book, Fixing Fairness: 4 Tenets to Transform Diversity Backlash into Progress for Al, Zheng examines how companies can continue to invest in DEI, despite recent pushback.

Zheng sat down with HR Brew to talk more about their book and how DEI work has shifted over the last decade.

For more from our conversation with Zheng, keep reading here.—MC

HR tech company Workleap is embarking on its next phase of growth with the appointment of Peter Dougherty as its chief revenue officer.

The Montreal-based company—behind Workleap platform, an AI-powered HR solution, and ShareGate, a data migration and governance solution—is bringing Dougherty on to its team to help facilitate global growth by aligning sales, marketing, and customer success.

Dougherty comes to Workleap with over 15 years of experience working at SaaS organizations, including global payments orchestration platform Spreedly and point-of-sale (POS) and e-commerce platform Lightspeed Commerce.

“What’s our value? What are the problems we solve? How are we helping our customers innovate and do more, especially in the era of ‘do more with less?’” Dougherty said about his overall strategy. “That’s the center point. That’s the middle of the onion of how you build great alignment across the organization.”

For more on what’s on the horizon for Workleap, keep reading on Revenue Brew.—LI

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s weekly news quiz has been compared to getting a company-wide shout out from your boss. It’s that satisfying.