CORPORATE GLOSSARY

How Your Employer is Stealing Your Leave

Corporate Glossary: every Friday, learn the secret meaning of common corporate words

Courtney Leigh
Index
Published in
7 min readJan 14, 2022

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Photo: Gustavo Fring/Pexels

There's a scene in the series "Dopesick" where Purdue Pharma's sales leaders have a big problem.

Purdue's medical doctor clients begin to see their patients showing signs of addiction to Purdue's flagship drug OxyContin®. No surprise, this drug was always a strong, addictive narcotic, but this was before the world discovered that.

Purdue's solution? Renaming the symptoms of addiction "pseudo-addiction." Purdue coached their salespeople to tell doctors these seeming signs of addiction were merely an indicator the patient was taking a too-low dosage of OxyContin®. Purdue instructed salespeople to teach their doctor clients about "pseudo-addiction" and tell them to prescribe more.

Cha-Ching!

Renaming things is dangerous, and it happens all the time because it’s also profitable.

This week's term: Sabbatical Leave

Let's go Biblical just for a second.

Most of us are familiar with the book of Genesis notoriously referring to God's "day of rest," but the Sabbath, we're talking about drops…

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