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

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

One of the employees laid off that day told TechCrunch about the experience: « I had a weird feeling in my stomach. I went to log into the VPN and the VPN was like, ‘this user no longer exists.’ Then I called my friend and was like, ‘Hey, do you see me on Slack?’ And she said, « No, your account has been disabled. »

The individual soon received an email stating that their role was terminated immediately. The separation proposal arrived 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 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 catch: Although stock compensation often makes up a good portion of a tech worker’s salary, especially at Oracle, the company didn’t accelerate the recent vesting of RSUs. Any shares not vested by the date of termination were forfeited.

This applies even to shares granted as retention incentives or in lieu of salary increases linked to promotions. One longtime employee lost $1 million in shares that were only four months after acquisition; RSUs make up about 70% of his compensation, Time reported.

Some employees also found that if they were classified as telecommuters by the company and didn’t work in a state with stricter regulations for workers like California or New York, the company said they weren’t eligible for WARN Act protections.

The WARN Act is a law that requires companies making mass layoffs to give employees two months’ notice before laying them off. Triggered when 50 or more people are affected in one location. By classifying employees as remote workers, the minimum location requirements can be circumvented.

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

Even if they were covered by the WARN Act, that would not necessarily extend the layoff, the former Oracle employee said. That’s because Oracle rolled the two-month WARN notice pay into its existing calculation of four weeks plus one week per year.

For a short time, a group of employees tried to negotiate en masse with Oracle, according to a letter seen by TechCrunch. At least 90 people have signed a public petition calling on the database and cloud computing giant to match the terms of other big tech companies that are making massive layoffs in the name of AI.

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

Microsoft, which extended voluntary retirement offers to longtime employees, provided accelerated stock vesting, a minimum of eight weeks of 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 laid off 20% of its workforce, offered a one-time severance package that was equivalent to base pay 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 is close to receiving another tranche, they will receive it.

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

Asked about the terms of the layoffs, the classification of employees as remote and the employees’ failed attempt to negotiate more, Oracle declined to comment.

Such a reaction from the company does not come as a surprise, even to those who hoped to negotiate. But it highlights 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 when it’s not.