Laid-off Oracle workers tried to negotiate better severance pay. Oracle said no.

As was widely reported, Oracle rejected an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people via email on March 31.

One of the employees who cut that day told TechCrunch about the experience: “I had this weird feeling in my gut. I went to log into the VPN and the VPN was like, ‘this user no longer exists.’ Then I called my friend and I was like, ‘Hey, can you see me in Slack?’ And she said, ‘No, your account has been disabled’.”

The person soon received an email stating that their role was terminated with immediate effect. The resignation offer came a few days later. But Oracle’s terms would quickly become a point of contention – and some laid-off employees would back down.

Oracle offered fairly standard Corporate America terms to laid-off employees. In exchange for signing a release waiving their right to sue, the employees received four weeks’ pay for the first year, plus an additional week per years of service, limited to 26 weeks. The company also paid for one month of COBRA insurance.

The catch: Although stock compensation often makes up a good chunk of a tech worker’s pay, especially at Oracle, the company didn’t accelerate RSUs that were due to vest soon. Any shares not vested on the termination date were forfeited.

This was true even for shares given as retention incentives or in lieu of salary increases linked to promotions. A long-time employee lost $1 million on shares that were only four months from vesting; RSUs made up about 70% of his compensation, Time reported.

Some employees also discovered that if they were classified as teleworkers by the company and didn’t work in a state with stronger worker regulations like California or New York, the company said they didn’t qualify for WARN Act protection.

The WARN Act is a law that requires companies that conduct mass layoffs to give employees two months notice before letting them go. It is triggered when 50 or more people are affected in one location. By classifying employees as remote workers, the minimum requirements for location can be circumvented.

Some people didn’t realize they were classified as telecommuters because they were near an office and working a hybrid schedule.

Although they were covered by the WARN Act, this did not necessarily extend the layoff, the former Oracle employee said. That’s because Oracle included two months of WARN termination pay in its existing calculation of four weeks plus one week per year.

For a brief period, a group of employees attempted to bargain en masse with Oracle, according to a letter seen by TechCrunch. At least 90 people signed a public petition calling on the database and cloud computing giant to match the terms of other major tech companies conducting mass layoffs in the name of AI.

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

Microsoft, which extended voluntary retirement offers to longtime employees, provided accelerated stock vesting, a minimum of eight weeks’ pay 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 one-time severance equal to base salary through the end of 2026, plus health coverage through the end of the year, and accelerated stock vesting through Aug. 15. So if an employee was close to getting another installment, they will get it.

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

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

Such a reaction from the company is not a surprise, not even to those who hoped to negotiate. But it underscores that for all the theoretically high pay (often via stock) and perks that tech workers enjoy when it’s an employee market, they have very few protections in place when it’s not.