The Cost Calculation
The financial motivation behind offshoring jobs is pretty simple; the annual salary of a U.S. STEM worker averages $115,000 versus $25,000 to $30,000 for an India-based one. That’s a staggering 75% cost reduction and further supports our speculation that Salesforce is purely interested in maximizing their profits at the expense of U.S. workers.
Funding Foreign Economies with American Dollars
Currently 93% of Salesforce’s revenue comes from U.S. customers, so it’s a bitter irony to learn they’re rapidly dismantling their American workforce. In short, Salesforce is reaping the profits it earns stateside and investing them in India’s future. And that commitment to India is becoming increasingly more profound.
In the last few years, Salesforce has partnered with over 2,500 Indian colleges and through its online training platform Trailhead, has granted 65,000 internships and plans to expand that number to 200,000. They’ve also executed memorandums of understanding (MOUs) that make Salesforce courses required in dozens of educational institutions.
Visa Program Manipulation
Salesforce has also been asking for more H-1B workers and is suspected of gaming the PERM process, the system through which H-1B visa holders are sponsored for Green Cards – at the same time they continue to lay off Americans. Between August 2023 and July 2024, Salesforce filed 824 PERM applications and over 4,300 H-1B petitions.
These immigration programs, which are ostensibly designed to address a shortage of skilled workers, are being used to displace qualified Americans. And adding insult to injury, companies like Salesforce further entrench an exploitative model by bringing in foreign managers to oversee the offshore teams they’ve established.