“Everyone is a row on a spreadsheet:” Inside Oracle’s mass layoffs and the workers who are fighting back

On March 31, a longtime Oracle employee named Jill was heading to the hospital for long-overdue back surgery when she received a call from her supervisor. Jill worked as a technical writer and instructor at Oracle for three decades, educating customers around the world about the company’s products. Last year, Oracle asked her and others on her team to document some of their workflows to train the company’s AI systems.

Now her supervisor told her on the phone that she had been fired. The sudden layoff not only jeopardized her ability to pay for post-surgical prescriptions, but also her entire retirement savings. For years, she had received high performance ratings from her managers and was rewarded with restricted stocks (RSUs) instead of bonuses. But those RSUs were tied to a vesting schedule, meaning her $300,000 worth disappeared overnight when she was fired.

“It…