|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The workforce at Oracle Inc.’s Pleasanton office and two of its other Bay Area locations has been struck by a round of global layoffs by the prominent software company that was formerly headquartered on the Peninsula.
The company filed WARN notices with the state earlier this month notifying the Employment Development Department that it is letting go a total of 45 employees at its Pleasanton offices on Owens Drive effective as part of the nearly 300 layoffs across three of its Bay Area locations.
The other Bay Area layoffs include 143 workers at the company’s Redwood City office on Oracle Drive, which served as its headquarters prior to a 2020 move to Austin, Texas. The Santa Clara office was also impacted, with 101 employees there receiving layoff notices.
Beyond information in the WARN reports, officials with Oracle Inc. had not responded to a request for comment or released additional public information on the layoffs as of Tuesday afternoon.
The layoff notices for Pleasanton and Redwood City workers were processed Aug. 13, with the notices for Santa Clara workers processed on Aug. 14. All 289 Bay Area employees impacted by the layoffs are set to depart Oct. 13.
While Oracle has not provided additional information on the layoffs or the reasons for them, the news has come amid several other announcements from the company about changes in its AI development and implementation.
On Aug. 13, the same day WARN notices were issued to Pleasanton and Redwood City workers, the company announced that it was ushering in a “new era of AI driven health records.” The following day, officials announced that it would be “accelerating enterprises’ agentic AI journeys” via a partnership with Google Cloud that allows Oracle customers to use Gemini models to build AI agents.
On Monday came an announcement that Open AI’s GPT 5 had been deployed across Oracle’s databases and cloud applications.
While the Bay Area layoffs include a significant number of workers, Oracle appears to continue to be a top employer in both Pleasanton and Redwood City. The company’s Pleasanton office employed 886 workers in 2024, according to data from the city of Pleasanton.
Redwood City lists Oracle as the city’s top employer as of 2023, at which point it accounted for more than 7% of the city’s workforce with 3,757 workers.
While some residents face layoffs and have to make sacrifices and re-skill themselves to find new employment in this changing world, the Pleasanton City wants to impose more tax and bonds on residents in addition to cutting services. The city and some members in the city council wants to isolate the city from any financial accountability – with the goal of protecting any personnel cuts even though it is the biggest expense in its budget.
The city needs to find ways to do more with less just like the rest of its residents. We cannot have the city’s budgets ballooning when the population and services have been declining in Pleasanton.