The laid-off Oracle workers tried to negotiate better compensation. Oracle said no.

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

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

The person soon received an email stating that their position had been canceled immediately. The severance offer came a few days later. But Oracle’s terms would quickly become a point of contention, and some laid-off employees would object.

Oracle offered fairly standard Corporate America terms to the laid-off employees. In exchange for signing a waiver of their right to sue, employees 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 for one month of COBRA insurance.

The problem: Although stock compensation often makes up a good portion of a tech worker’s salary, particularly at Oracle, the company didn’t accelerate RSU vesting anytime soon. All shares not vested on the termination date were forfeited.

This applies even to shares granted as retention incentives or in lieu of salary increases linked to promotions. One long-time employee lost $1 million in stock that was just four months away from vesting; RSUs accounted for about 70% of his compensation, Reported time.

Some employees also found that if the company classified them as remote workers and they did not work in a state with stricter work provisions like California or New York, the company said they did not qualify for WARN Act protections.

He The WARN Act is a law That requires companies carrying out mass layoffs to give employees two months’ notice before laying them off. It is activated when 50 or more people are affected in a location. By classifying employees as remote workers, 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 a hybrid schedule.

Even if they were covered by the WARN Act, this would not necessarily expand compensation, the former Oracle employee said. This is because Oracle included the two-month WARN notice payment in its existing calculation of four weeks, plus one week per year.

For a brief time, a group of employees attempted to negotiate 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 big tech companies making 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 salary, plus two weeks for each year of employment, and covered COBRA for 18 months.

Microsoft, which expanded voluntary retirement offers to longer-serving employees, provided accelerated vesting, an eight-week minimum salary, and one or two additional weeks for every six months of service, depending on rank, reported the Seattle Times.

And Cloudflare, which just cut 20% of its employees, offered severance pay That was the equivalent of base salary through the end of 2026, plus health care coverage through the end of the year and accelerated stock vesting through August 15. So if an employee was close to getting another tranche, they’ll get it.

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

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

This reaction from the company is not surprising, not even for those who expected to negotiate. But it does underscore that for all the theoretical high salaries (often through stock) and benefits that tech workers enjoy when it’s an employee market, they have very few protections when it’s not.