Oracle laid off tens of thousands of people on March 31 by email, and when a group of workers tried collectively to negotiate better severance, the company simply refused to come to the table. The numbers are familiar, the brutality is new: between 20,000 and 30,000 people on the street, severance set to the floor, and a mixed policy designed to dodge federal law.

Oracle's standard package: four weeks base for the first year, plus one week for each additional year, capped at 26 weeks. COBRA health coverage runs for one month. For comparison, Meta starts at 16 weeks and adds two weeks per year - five times more than Oracle on entry. Microsoft and Cloudflare are also above Oracle.

What particularly burned the workers is the hidden trick. Oracle reclassified part of its remote workforce so they don't fall under the US WARN Act, which requires two months' notice in a mass layoff. A classification that protects office workers but leaves remote workers with fewer rights - on paper legal, in practice an exploitation of a legal loophole.

One long-tenured employee lost 1 million dollars in unvested shares - was four months away from vesting. 70 percent of his total compensation was in RSUs. When the company let him go the week before the cutoff, that money simply evaporated. Over 90 employees signed an open petition demanding negotiations. Oracle did not respond.

In the Balkans this sounds familiar. Contracts with empty clauses for the end of an employment relationship, companies that go to ground when they need to fire people, legal loopholes that always work against the worker - that's a working day in this corner of the world. Only Oracle does something even worse: it shows everyone that the same thing can happen to American workers, and that there is no corporate ethics until there is a corporate cost.