Devalued work and firings are relabeled with inflated titles to ease moral discomfort

Evidence

Dismissals are clothed in softened or even promotive terms. The hapless workers are recipients of a “career alternative enhancement” or are placed in “non-duty, non-pay status.” Jobs that are socially devalued and underpaid are given convoluted, fancy names. A garbage worker is a “collector of surplus commodities.” A janitor is a “particulate matter remover.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 378

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• CANDY: ‘Particulate matter remover’ for janitor is a sharp, shareable example of bureaucratic euphemism.
• XREF: Connects to the more recent wave of rebranding janitors as ‘sanitation engineers’ and baristas with inflated titles — the pattern holds and intensifies.

Related

• Euphemism re-clothes devalued work and layoffs as benign or promotive (similarity 0.87)