Dead Peasants Insurance

Taken from: Dude, Where's My Country by Michael Moore


Are you aware that your company may have taken a life insurance policy out on you? Oh how nice of them, you say? yeah, here's how nice it is:

During the past twenty years, companies including, Disney, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Dow Chemical, JP Morgan Chase, and Wal Mart have been secretly taking out life insurance policies on their low- and mid-level employees and then naming themselves - the Corporation - as the benificiary!!! Thats right ; When you die, the company -not your survivors- get to cash in. If you die on the job, all the better, as most life insurance policies are geared to pay out more when someone dies young. And if you live to a ripe old age, even long after you've left the company, the company still gets to collect on your death. The money does not goto your grieving relatives through hard times or to pay for the funeral or burial; it goes to the corporate executives. and regardless of when you croak, the company is able to borrow against the policy and deduct the interest from its corporate taxes.
Many of these companies have set up a system for the money to go pay for executive bonuses, cars , homes , trips to the Caribbean. your death goes to helping make your boss a very happy man sitting in his jacuzzi on St Barts.
And what do the Corporations call this special form of life insurance?

Dead Peasants Insurance

That's right. "Dead Peasants." Because thats what you are to them - peasants. And you are sometimes worth more to them dead than alive. (It's also sometimes referred to as "Dead Janitors" insurance.)

When I read about this in The Wall Street Journal last year (2002), I thought I had picked up one of those parody versions of that newspaper. But, no, this was the real deal , and the writers , Ellen Shultz and Theo Francis, told some heartbreaking stories of employees who died and whose families could have used the money.

They wrote of a man who died at twenty-nine of complications of AIDS, who had no life insurance of his own. His family received no death benefits , but CM Holdings, the parent company of the music store where he worked, collected $339,302 at his death.

Another CM Holdings policy was taken out on an administrative assistant who earned $21,000 a year, who died from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease). According to the Journal Story, the company turned down a request by her grown children, who cared for her during her illness, to help buy her a $5000 wheelchair so they could take their mother to church. When the woman died in 1998 the company recieved a payout of $180,000.

Some of the companies - Wal Mart among them- have stopped the practice, but for now the policies continue at many companies. Is your company one of them? You might want to find out. It's good to know that , after you die, your corpse could in fact mean a new Porche for the chairman.