The laid-off Oracle employees are trying to negotiate a better severance. Oracle said no.

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

One of the employees who got cut that day told TechCrunch about it: “I had, like, this weird feeling in my stomach. I went to log into the VPN, and the VPN was like, ‘this user is gone.’ Then I called my friend, and I said, ‘Hey, do you see me on Slack?’ He said, ‘No, your account is closed.'”

This person immediately received an email stating that their role was terminated immediately. The offer of separation came a few days later. But Oracle’s policies will quickly become controversial — and some of the laid-off employees will push back.

Oracle has provided Corporate America’s ideal layoff policies. For signing a waiver waiving their right to sue, employees received four weeks of pay in the first year, plus one additional week per year of service, capped at 26 weeks. The company also paid COBRA insurance for one month.

The catch: While stock compensation typically makes up a good portion of a tech employee’s salary, especially at Oracle, the company didn’t accelerate newly vested RSUs. Any shares not yet vested on the termination date were forfeited.

That was true even of stock awarded as final bonuses or in lieu of salary increases that accompanied promotions. One long-time employee lost $1 million in a stock that had only been in the money for four months; RSUs make up about 70% of his compensation, Time reported.

Some workers also found that if they were described as remote workers by the company, and did not work in a state with strong labor provisions such as California or New York, the company said they did not qualify for WARN Act protection.

The WARN Act is a law that requires companies that make mass layoffs to give workers two months notice before letting them go. It is started when 50 or more people are affected in one place. By classifying workers as remote workers, minimum space requirements can be deferred.

Some people did not know that they were classified as remote workers, because they were close to the office and worked on a mixed schedule.

Even if they were covered by the WARN Act, this did not extend the layoff period, the former Oracle employee said. That’s because Oracle has added a two-month WARN notice fee to its existing four-week figure, plus one week per year.

For a short period of time, a group of employees tried to negotiate with Oracle in bulk, according to a letter seen by TechCrunch. At least 90 people have signed a public petition urging the website and cloud computing giant to comply with the terms of other major tech companies that are laying off more people in the name of AI.

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

Microsoft, which extended voluntary retirement offers to long-serving employees, as long as accelerated stock sales, eight weeks’ pay, and another one to two weeks every six months of work, depending on the position, reported the Seattle Times.

And Cloudflare, which recently cut 20% of its workforce, offered a total amount of severance that was equal to the base salary at the end of 2026, and health care at the end of the year, and accelerated the stock offering on August 15. So if the employee was close to getting another phase, he will get it.

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

When asked about its terms of the termination, which classified the workers as remote, and the workers’ unsuccessful attempt to negotiate more, Oracle declined to comment.

Such a reaction from the company is not surprising, even for those who hoped to negotiate. But it’s worth noting that for all the theoretically high salaries (often in stocks) and benefits that tech workers enjoy when it’s the labor market, they have very little security in place otherwise.