Fired Oracle workers tried to negotiate better severance. Oracle said no.

As widely reported, Oracle they axed about 20,000 to 30,000 people by email on March 31.

One of the employees who was cut that day told TechCrunch about the experience: “I had, like, this weird feeling in my stomach. I went to connect to the VPN and the VPN was like, ‘this user doesn’t exist anymore.’ Then I called my friend and said, ‘Hey, can you see me on Slack?’ And he said, ‘No, your account has been disabled.’

The individual soon received an email stating that their role was terminated immediately. The exit offer arrived a few days later. But Oracle’s terms would quickly become a point of contention — and some laid-off employees would push back.

Oracle offered fairly standard Corporate America terms for employee layoffs. In exchange for signing a release waiving their right to sue, workers received four weeks of pay for the first year, plus one additional week per year of service, capped at 26 weeks. The company also paid one month of COBRA insurance.

The catch: Although stock compensation is often a large part of a tech worker’s compensation, particularly at Oracle, the company did not accelerate RSUs that will vest soon. Any shares not vested by the date of termination are forfeited.

This was true even for shares granted as retention incentives or in lieu of salary increases linked to promotions. A longtime employee lost $1 million in stock that was only four months from vesting. RSUs made up about 70% of his compensation, The time was mentioned.

Some employees also found that if they were classified as remote workers by the company and didn’t work in a state with stronger labor laws like California or New York, the company said they didn’t qualify for WARN Act protection.

THE WARNING The law is the law which requires companies conducting mass layoffs to give employees two months’ notice before letting them go. Triggered when 50 or more people are affected in a location. By classifying workers as remote workers, the minimum location requirements can be circumvented.

Some people didn’t know they were classified as remote workers because they were close to an office and working on a hybrid schedule.

Even if they were covered by the WARN Act, that doesn’t necessarily extend the layoff, the former Oracle employee said. This is because Oracle included the two-month WARN notice fee in the existing four-week calculation, plus one week per year.

For a short time, a group of employees tried to bargain en masse with Oracle, according to a letter seen by TechCrunch. At least 90 people signed a public petition urging the database and cloud computing giant to match the terms of other major tech companies carrying out mass layoffs in the name of artificial intelligence.

For example, Meta’s severance package, according to an email published by Business Insider, started at 16 weeks of base pay, plus two weeks for each year of employment, and covered COBRA for 18 months.

Microsoft, which extended severance offers to longtime employees, provided accelerated stock vesting, at least eight weeks’ salary and an additional one to two weeks for every six months of service, depending on rank; the Seattle Times reported.

And Cloudflare, which just cut 20% of its workforce, offered lump sum compensation that was the equivalent of base pay through the end of 2026, plus health care coverage through the end of the year and accelerated stock vesting through August 15. So if a worker was close to receiving another dose, they will take it.

Oracle declined to negotiate, according to an email seen by TechCrunch. It was a take-it-or-leave-it scenario, the employee said.

When asked about the terms of the severance, the classification of workers as remote and the workers’ failed attempt to negotiate more, Oracle declined to comment.

Such a reaction from the company is no surprise, not even to those who were hoping to negotiate. But he points out that for all the theoretically high pay (often via stock) and perks that tech workers enjoy when it comes to the labor market, they have very few protections in place when it’s not.