Laid-off Oracle employees attempted to negotiate better terminations. Oracle said no.

As widely reported, Oracle laid off approximately 20,000 to 30,000 employees in a March 31 email.

One of the employees that day told TechCrunch about the experience: “I had a strange feeling. I went to log into the VPN and the VPN said, ‘This user no longer exists.’ Then I called my friend and asked, ‘Can you see that I’m on Slack?’ And he said, ‘No, your account is deactivated.’”

The person soon received an email saying his role would be terminated effective immediately. A few days later the severance offer arrived. But Oracle’s terms soon became controversial and some laid-off employees protested.

Oracle offered fairly standard Corporate America terms to its laid-off employees. In exchange for signing an agreement waiving their right to sue, employees received four weeks of pay in the first year and one additional week per year, limited to 26 weeks. The company was also paying for one month’s worth of COBRA insurance.

The problem: Stock compensation often makes up a significant portion of a tech worker’s salary, but especially at Oracle, the company hasn’t accelerated any RSUs that will be completed soon. Any shares not vested by the termination date were forfeited.

This is also true for stock granted as a retention incentive or in lieu of a pay increase following a promotion. One long-tenured employee lost $1 million in stock just four months after vesting. RSUs accounted for about 70% of the compensation, Time reported.

Additionally, some employees have found that they are not eligible for WARN Act protections unless their companies classify them as remote workers and work in states with stronger worker provisions, such as California or New York.

The WARN Act requires companies conducting mass layoffs to give employees two months notice before laying them off. This occurs when more than 50 people are affected in one location. Classifying employees as remote workers allows you to avoid minimum location requirements.

Some people didn’t realize they were classified as remote workers because they were located near an office and worked a hybrid schedule.

Being covered by the WARN Act doesn’t necessarily mean your layoff period will be extended, a former Oracle employee said. This is because Oracle has included 2 months worth of WARN notice pay by adding 1 week per year to the previous calculation of 4 weeks.

For a while, a group of employees attempted to collectively negotiate 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 join other tech giants in carrying out mass layoffs in the name of AI.

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

Microsoft, which has expanded its voluntary severance offer to long-serving employees, is offering accelerated stock vesting, at least eight weeks of pay, and one to two weeks of additional benefits for every six months of service depending on rank, the Seattle Times reported.

And Cloudflare, which has cut its workforce by just 20%, is offering severance pay equal to base salary through the end of 2026, health benefits through the end of the year, and has fast-tracked stock vesting by Aug. 15.

Oracle declined to negotiate, according to emails seen by TechCrunch. “It was a take it or leave it scenario,” the employee said.

When asked about severance terms, categorizing employees as remote and the company’s failure to negotiate further, Oracle declined to comment.

This response from the company will not come as a surprise to those hoping to negotiate. But it highlights that despite the theoretically higher salaries (often through stock) and perks that tech workers enjoy when they are an employee market, there are few protections when they are not.