Oracle Corp plans to lay off up to 1,000 workers in Europe, or about 1 percent of its global staff, as the recession erodes the giant software company's earnings, French news agency AFP reported on Thursday.

Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger declined to comment.

The world's No. 2 publicly held software maker would be one of the last major technology companies to undertake significant layoffs in this economic downturn.

Oracle would join EMC Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, International Business Machines Corp, Intel Corp, Microsoft Corp and SAP AG, among others.

Trade unions learned of the job cuts on Monday and Tuesday during committee meetings of Oracle's European workers, according to the AFP report.

Redwood City, California-based Oracle had some 86,000 employees as of May 31, compared with 84,233 a year earlier. About a third of the software maker's employees are in the United States.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

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