The fired Oracle employees tried to negotiate a successful severance. Oracle said no.

As predicted, Oracle they killed about 20,000 to 30,000 people via email on March 31.

One of the employees who was cut that day told TechCrunch about the incident: “I had, like, a weird feeling in my stomach. I went to log into the VPN, and the VPN was like, ‘this user doesn’t exist anymore.’ Then I called my friend, and I was like, ‘Hey, do you see me on Slack?’ And he said, ‘No, your account is closed.’

The person soon received an email stating that their position had been terminated immediately. The separate service arrived a few days later. But Oracle’s words can be controversial — and some laid-off employees are pushing back.

Oracle filed suit against Corporate America to lay off workers. In exchange for signing a waiver of their right to sue, workers received four weeks of pay in the first year, plus one additional week per year of service, totaling 26 weeks. The company also paid for one month of COBRA insurance.

The catch: While compensation often makes up a large portion of a technology employee’s pay, especially at Oracle, the company has not accelerated vesting of RSUs. Any shares that had not been tendered by the deadline were forfeited.

This was true even for goods offered as retention incentives or salary increases related to promotions. A longtime employee lost $1 million with only four months left to buy; RSUs made up about 70% of his salary, The time was told.

Some workers also noted that if the company tested remote workers, and did not work in a state with strict worker requirements like California or New York, the company said they were not eligible for WARN Act protection.

The The WARN Act is a law which requires companies making mass layoffs to give workers two months’ notice before letting them go. It starts when 50 or more people are affected in one place. By choosing employees as remote workers, the location requirements can be reduced.

Some people do not know that they are called remote workers, because they are close to the office and work in different areas.

Although covered by the WARNING Act, this did not increase layoffs, a former Oracle employee said. That’s because Oracle included two months of WARN notice payments in its calculation of four weeks, plus one week per year.

For a short time, the group of employees tried to negotiate with Oracle, according to a letter seen by TechCrunch. At least 90 people signed a public petition boosting the database and cloud computing giant to match what other big tech companies are doing away with in the name of AI.

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

Microsoft, which extends voluntary retirement options to long-term workers, is offering extra pay, at least eight weeks of pay, and one or two weeks of extra pay for every six months of work, depending on position. The Seattle Times said.

And Cloudflare, which just cut 20% of its workforce, he gave a small amount This was equal to the starting salary at the end of the year 2026, including health care at the end of the year, and accelerated the sale of goods through August 15. So if the worker is about to get another tranche, he will receive it.

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

When asked about its terms of layoffs, the classification of employees as remote, and the inability of employees to negotiate more, Oracle declined to comment.

Such comments from the company are not surprising, even for those who hope to negotiate. But it proves that for all the speculative pay (often through stocks) and benefits that tech workers enjoy in the labor market, they have little to no security.