Oracle Is Closing for a Week—and Making Workers Use Paid Vacation Time for It (2024)

This post originally appeared on Business Insider.

Some Oracle employees are upset about a new edict coming from on high that affects their vacation time. The company has decided to close down during the holiday week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Lots of tech companies do that.But in Oracle’s case, it is mandating that all employees pay for thisfurlough with four days of their PTO/vacation time, according to several sources we spoke to. That’s far less common.

“We all know that it’s actually a trick to get rid of accrued PTO on their balance sheet before the next year,” one employee told us. “Needless to say, people are clearly very unhappy about this announcement, especially since it just happened this week and holiday season is just around the corner.”

The really harsh part is that Oracle isn’t particularly generous when it comes to vacation time.

For the first five years, employees are entitled to two weeks off and after five years, three weeks off, employees tell us. However some managers are more generous with time off than others,according to reports on Glassdoor, and sick days are not counted as PTO, according toOracle’s website.

Employees also get eight federal holidays off, working through holidays like Martin Luther King Day.

But compared to say, HP, where long-term employees can earn four and even five weeks of vacation, Oracle’s vacation policy isn’t all that competitive.

Some employeesare blaming Mark Hurd for the mandatory vacation days plan, since he was known for his extreme cost-cutting when he was CEO at HP. We’re hearing that other cost-cutting efforts are also being rolled out, such as trimming back on car allowances for some people in the marketing sales teams that report to him.

It’s not shocking that Oracle is keeping a tight eye on expenses. Top line revenue shrank a tadbetween 2014 and 2015, from $38.28 billion to $38.27 billion,according to Google Finance.

An Oracle spokesperson declined comment, but did point out that Oracle isn’t going into a wholesale cost cutting phase. It’s still hiring like crazy, withnearly 10,000 open jobslisted on its website, for instance, and it has ratcheted up R&Da bit, spending $8.7 billion in its last fiscal year (ended in August) compared to $8.6 billion in fiscal 2014.

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