Oracle Layoffs Show Why Tech Workers Should Fight to Elect Kshama to Congress

BY JOAN WRIGHT

Thank you to everyone who joined us at the Tech Workers for Kshama national meeting. The energy was incredible, and we're just getting started. During our discussion, one tech worker asked a question that I think is on every tech worker's mind right now: how do we fight against the mass layoffs happening in the tech sector?

Barely 24 hours after our meeting, we saw exactly why this matters: on March 31st, between 20,000 and 30,000 Oracle workers, roughly 18% of the company's global workforce, woke up to a cold five-line email from "Oracle Leadership" at 6am. No phone call. No meeting with HR. No warning from their managers. Just a message telling them their roles had been eliminated, that today was their last working day, and that their access to company systems had already been cut.

Oracle is not a company in distress. It posted a 95% jump in profits last quarter, $6.13 billion in a single quarter. The principal owner of Oracle stock, Larry Ellison, owns $200 billion in wealth and is the sixth-richest person in the world. Other top Oracle executives and major shareholders are also billionaires and multimillionaires. Like Jeffrey Henley and Clayton Magouyrk, who have an estimated net worth of a billion dollars and nearly $44 million, respectively.

This layoff “bloodbath,” as it’s being called, is about profit-hoarding by billionaires and multimillionaires and redirecting tens of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure while discarding the workers who built the company.

Oracle is far from an exception. In just the first three months of 2026, tech workers have been hit by a layoff wave unlike anything we've seen in years. Amazon has cut over 30,000 jobs since late 2025, including 16,000 corporate roles in January, its second major round of cuts in three months. Microsoft has cut over 15,000 workers. Google, Meta, Block, Intel, Pinterest, Autodesk — the list goes on. In total, over 85,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2026 alone. Nearly a thousand layoffs per day.

The bosses have a name for this: "efficiency." We should call it what it really is: class war by the bosses against the working class. Capitalism IS class war.

The profits of the tech bosses, as for all billionaires and multimillionaires, come from the wealth produced by the labor of tech workers and all the other workers who make all the corporations run every single day. The vast majority of the wealth is then stolen by the bosses. 

That’s why any gain workers can win in the form of job protection, wage increases, and improvements in benefits and working conditions, can only come out of the profits of the bosses. That means our interests and the bosses' interests are fundamentally opposed, and no amount of polite negotiating changes that.

What we need is a class struggle based fightback. In the labor movement, it means we need class struggle unionism: the understanding that the only way workers can build leverage is by shutting down production and profits until management is forced to concede. That means boldly exposing the bosses, building solidarity across the entire working class, and connecting our workplace fights to the broader political struggle for free healthcare, rent control, and taxes on the rich, and against imperialist war, ICE terror, and the cost-of-living crisis.

It also means breaking from the Democratic and Republican parties, both parties of the bosses. For decades, the leadership of the labor movement has funneled money, volunteers, and political support into the Democratic Party, and workers and rank-and-file union members have gotten betrayal after betrayal in return. Most of the billionaires and multimillionaires donate to both Democratic and Republican politicians. Adam Smith, the Democratic incumbent Kshama is running against, has taken money from numerous wealthy individuals, including executives and major shareholders of Microsoft and Palantir. 

Workers who try to fight back already know what happens. My coworkers and I, unionized with Kickstarter United, went on a 42-day strike against the bosses at the Kickstarter corporation, and won real gains. Management's response? Blatant union busting and firing four union leaders in February.Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose firm invested over $100 million in Kickstarter, have donated millions of dollars to Trump's campaigns.

Many of the tech billionaires, like Larry Ellison, are both shameless promoters of the genocide and slaughter of the Palestinian people in Gaza, and profiteers benefitting from imperialist war, including the ongoing brutal assault on Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon.

That is why we are building Tech Workers for Kshama. During her decade as a socialist city councilmember in Seattle, Kshama didn't make backroom deals with Democrats or Republicans. She built mass movements that won the nation’s highest minimum wage, defeated billionaire Jeff Bezos to win the Amazon Tax, and won renters' rights protections. She came to our picket line, organized solidarity rallies, and donated to our strike fund. When management retaliated and fired our coworkers, she showed up to demand their jobs back. That is what independent working-class politics looks like. Kshama’s campaign is calling for an end to all imperialist war, a permanent end to all U.S. military aid to Israel, and to shut down ICE. She's fighting for free healthcare for all and a massive expansion of affordable housing, funded by taxing the rich. She's fighting for national rent control, against the exploitative corporate landlords and real estate investors. 

I urge all tech workers, all workers, to join me in building Kshama’s campaign for Congress!

By joining Kshama’s campaign, we are saying that workers are not line items to be deleted by a 6am email. That we will not accept imperialist war and bloodshed. That we will organize to end ICE terror.

When we fight, we can win.