Thomas Veil
Mar 5, 2005, 03:49 PM
Do you have a life insurance policy? No? Are you sure?
...Wal-Mart has been...a leader among corporations engaged in an elaborate, money-grubbing scheme called Dead Peasants life insurance. Under some state laws, the corporation can take out up to $750,000 worth of life insurance on a single employee -- without ever telling the employee.
The macabre aspect of this is that the policy is not for the worker, but for the corporation! When the worker dies, the insurance money goes to the corporation, while the family of the deceased doesn't get a dime or even know that such a policy existed.
When Douglas Sims died suddenly from a heart attack in 1998, for example, Wal-Mart quietly pocketed $64,000 from a Dead Peasant policy it had taken out on him. His widow, Jane, got nothing and knew nothing. When she later learned about it, she told a Houston Chronicle reporter: "I never dreamed they could profit from my husband's death."
...The laws say that the employees are supposed to give their consent, but it turns out that you can consent without knowing it, for it can be buried in the legalese of an employment form you sign -- there's no requirement that the company actually tell you what you're signing.
Wal-Mart has taken out some 350,000 of these policies on employees, buying them from Hartford and AIG insurance companies. Its green-eyeshade accounting whizzes even jiggered the deal so Wal-Mart could get a tax deduction on the premiums. The company hires a firm to run sweeps of Social Security numbers -- called "death runs" -- every quarter to find out who has died, then it submits those names to the insurers...and collects.
A Wal-Mart spokesman told the Chronicle: "The company feels it acted properly and legally in doing this."
Some of the "peasants" have rebelled, however, filing lawsuits from Texas to Maine. Wal-Mart is fighting them in court, but because of the workers' suits and bad publicity, it says it has not stopped buying Dead Peasant policies.
-- Jim Hightower, "Thieves in High Places", pp. 190-191During the past twenty years, companies including Disney, Nestlé, Proctor & 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 beneficiary! That's right: When you die, the company -- not your survivors -- gets 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 go to help your grieving relatives through hard times or to pay for the funeral and 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 to 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.
...When I read about this in The Wall Street Journal last year, I thought I had mistakenly picked up one of those parody versions of that newspaper. But, no, this was the real deal, and the writers, Ellen Schultz 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 from her grown children, who cared for her during her illness, to help buy a $5,000 wheelchair so they could take their mother to church. When the woman died in 1998 the company received a payout of $180,000.
Some of the companies -- Wal-Mart among them -- have stopped the practice. Some states have enacted laws banning "Dead Peasants" policies, and others are considering similar actions. And numerous lawsuits have been filed against companies by survivors of deceased employees seeking to be named the beneficiaries of the policies. But, for now, the policies continue at many companies. Is yours 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 Porsche for the chairman.
-- Michael Moore, "Dude, Where's My Country?", pp. 145-147And people ask, with a straight face, why average folks want to tar and feather CEOs and rich folks? :eek:
...Wal-Mart has been...a leader among corporations engaged in an elaborate, money-grubbing scheme called Dead Peasants life insurance. Under some state laws, the corporation can take out up to $750,000 worth of life insurance on a single employee -- without ever telling the employee.
The macabre aspect of this is that the policy is not for the worker, but for the corporation! When the worker dies, the insurance money goes to the corporation, while the family of the deceased doesn't get a dime or even know that such a policy existed.
When Douglas Sims died suddenly from a heart attack in 1998, for example, Wal-Mart quietly pocketed $64,000 from a Dead Peasant policy it had taken out on him. His widow, Jane, got nothing and knew nothing. When she later learned about it, she told a Houston Chronicle reporter: "I never dreamed they could profit from my husband's death."
...The laws say that the employees are supposed to give their consent, but it turns out that you can consent without knowing it, for it can be buried in the legalese of an employment form you sign -- there's no requirement that the company actually tell you what you're signing.
Wal-Mart has taken out some 350,000 of these policies on employees, buying them from Hartford and AIG insurance companies. Its green-eyeshade accounting whizzes even jiggered the deal so Wal-Mart could get a tax deduction on the premiums. The company hires a firm to run sweeps of Social Security numbers -- called "death runs" -- every quarter to find out who has died, then it submits those names to the insurers...and collects.
A Wal-Mart spokesman told the Chronicle: "The company feels it acted properly and legally in doing this."
Some of the "peasants" have rebelled, however, filing lawsuits from Texas to Maine. Wal-Mart is fighting them in court, but because of the workers' suits and bad publicity, it says it has not stopped buying Dead Peasant policies.
-- Jim Hightower, "Thieves in High Places", pp. 190-191During the past twenty years, companies including Disney, Nestlé, Proctor & 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 beneficiary! That's right: When you die, the company -- not your survivors -- gets 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 go to help your grieving relatives through hard times or to pay for the funeral and 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 to 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.
...When I read about this in The Wall Street Journal last year, I thought I had mistakenly picked up one of those parody versions of that newspaper. But, no, this was the real deal, and the writers, Ellen Schultz 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 from her grown children, who cared for her during her illness, to help buy a $5,000 wheelchair so they could take their mother to church. When the woman died in 1998 the company received a payout of $180,000.
Some of the companies -- Wal-Mart among them -- have stopped the practice. Some states have enacted laws banning "Dead Peasants" policies, and others are considering similar actions. And numerous lawsuits have been filed against companies by survivors of deceased employees seeking to be named the beneficiaries of the policies. But, for now, the policies continue at many companies. Is yours 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 Porsche for the chairman.
-- Michael Moore, "Dude, Where's My Country?", pp. 145-147And people ask, with a straight face, why average folks want to tar and feather CEOs and rich folks? :eek:
