'Everyone’s a Line On a Spreadsheet:' Inside Oracle’s Mass Layoffs and the Workers Fighting Back

On March 31, a longtime Oracle employee named Jill drove to the hospital for a very overdue back surgery when she received a call from her manager. Jill had worked at Oracle as a technical writer and instructor across three decades, teaching customers around the world about the company’s products. Last year, Oracle had asked her and others on her team to document some of their workflows in order to train the company’s AI systems. Now, her manager told her over the phone, she had been laid off. The sudden firing imperiled not only her ability to pay for post-surgery prescriptions, but her entire retirement plan. For years, she had received high performance scores from her managers and was rewarded with restricted stock (RSUs) in lieu of bonuses. But those RSUs were tied to a vesting schedule, meaning when she was fired, $300,000 worth vanished overnight.“It really makes you feel used and abused,” says Jill, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retaliation. “They’re having you do something, it’s recorded, and then they’re going to replace you with whatever you just built.” Jill is one of up to 30,000 workers who were laid off by Oracle in the