NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Tech giant Oracle appears to have begun layoffs at its Nashville offices.
The apparent move comes as plans for Nashville’s massive East Bank development — featuring a planned Oracle riverfront tech campus — continue to move forward.
Emails to Oracle’s corporate offices to confirm the layoffs were not immediately returned, and it’s unclear how many Nashville Oracle employees are affected.
One current Oracle employee in Nashville, who requested anonymity to discuss company information that hadn’t yet been publicly released, told NewsChannel 5 he knows of at least 10 people based in Nashville who have been given layoff notices, but he suspects the actual number could be much higher. The employee provided NewsChannel 5 with an email he received from an Oracle employee detailing the layoff, as well as a corporate Reduction In Force document the company emailed him.
According to the layoff email, the employee was given one week’s notice on Monday, with his last day set for October 31.
The employee said the vast majority of people on his team of about a dozen people moved to Nashville from out of town to take a job with Oracle, working remotely with expectations to move into the new east bank campus once it opened up.
The employee said everyone on his team had been given layoff notices, all of whom started with the company in February. He said many of his team members are locked into year-long apartment leases they now cannot get out of.
Several LinkedIn profiles feature posts from people who say they work at Nashville’s Oracle offices and who said they were laid off this week.
The employee told NewsChannel 5 that at least some of the layoffs happened within Oracle’s cloud organization — a team that sells cloud infrastructure and technology to other companies.
The apparent move comes after the tech giant received promises of nearly a quarter-billion dollars in taxpayer money to build a tech campus here and create jobs.
The first deal came in May 2021, when Oracle agreed to front Metro Nashville up to $175 million to help fund part of the East Bank development in East Nashville. The city would repay Oracle’s money through discounted property taxes over 25 years.
Then, in September 2021, the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development gave Oracle $65 million to help pay for expenses like construction and land acquisition for their campus.
In return, Oracle promised to create 5,989 net new jobs within 5 years. It’s not clear whether any layoffs from Oracle would put the company in violation of those agreements.
According to the Oracle reduction in force document, if employees sign a termination agreement, they get a severance of four weeks’ pay for one year of service, plus one week extra for each additional year of service.
