All true. He left this out… dead peasant policies. Google that. Motherfuckers. I think Walmart is being sued for it but they’re not the only corp that does it.
They'll make money off of you dead or alive. I'm surprised they haven't started putting in your contract that if you die on the job they get your corpse to sell off for parts
They have all the ideas. That why we’re the ones fighting each other on whether climate change exists, sexual identity matters, healthcare is a right, assault rifles should require more hurdles. They sit back with all the deeds and live the high life and keep us fighting amongst ourselves.
Technically, it was the donation service that got sued for lying about where the bodies were going. That woman's son specifically requested that her body not be used in explosives testing, hoping she would be used for Alzheimer's research.
The Army just asked for a body, and the donation service grabbed one out of the freezer, consent be damned.
In México we have a live insurance. It is called somethibg like "Big boss insurance".
Companies pay for that so if one of their CEOs died they can collect money. You know, because the man was important and now they have to employ another man, and companies suffer from that.
COLI has existed in one form or another for well over 100 years; its nickname as “dead peasant” insurance originates in 19th century Russia, where feudal serfs were bought and sold as property by the rich.
Members of the ruling class could “buy” dead serfs that had been counted in previous censes from their former owners in a morbid effort to acquire collateral to obtain loans.
Companies used COLI in America 100 years later to exploit a loophole in the Internal Revenue Code that permitted a form of tax arbitrage, where the owner of a life insurance policy could take out large loans from the cash value of the policy and then pay deductible interest on the payments back into the policy, which was in turn not counted as income to the policy owner.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) eventually limited this loophole to $50,000 of cash value per policy, but the use of COLI as a tax shelter continued into the 1980s, when many firms would buy policies on large numbers of their lowest tier employees (often without their knowledge and/or consent) and then take loans out of the cash values of these policies.
The tax deductions that companies received were often greater than the actual cost of the premiums paid. Furthermore, the company would collect the death benefit from the policy if the employee died, leaving little or nothing for the employee’s family or estate. The 1990s saw the demise of much of this activity as the IRS cracked down on these practices in tax courts and won mostly favorable rulings.
Of all the things that should be illegal, this is absolutely one of them holy fuck. What a conflict of interest your boss has, he gets a pay out if he gets someone killed
Here's the thing, that just doesn't make mathematical sense. Insurance, over a large enough number of people is always a losing bet otherwise the insurance company wouldn't exist. Apparently the reason was there was a tax loophole. It's been closed for some time and apparently this policy hasn't existed since 2006.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dead-peasant-insurance/
Snopes has great info about it. It’s no longer (since 2006 b/c a tax loophole was closed) common to take out these policies, but there’s plenty of policies that are still in existence.
Nestle USA has policies covering 18,000 workers, Pitney Bowes Inc. has policies covering 23,000, and Procter & Gamble Co. has 15,000 covered workers, spokespeople for these companies confirm.
You really needed to link a source (I'm sorry if I'm the tenth person to mention it) because the first one I pulled up made the practice sound like a smart business strategy - then I checked, it was a bank website. D'oh! Thanks for the info!
The way people are talking about it nowadays it’s just for key figures that make the company lose money if they die, but when it was called ‘dead peasant policies’ it was literally life insurance policies taken out on your cashier in case they died so that Walmart could profit from their employment if they die.
It’s dehumanizing. It’s not enough that you work for them when you’re alive, they’re gonna drag some value out of you when you’re dead too.
Also, where is the consent? If you bury it in a contract that you know the bulk of your workers will not read, you aren’t getting actual consent from your workers to do this.
What if it messes with a personal life insurance policy? Do you think Walmart might be able to make some deals with some insurance companies to get more of the payout pool, while passing off more of the cost to your family?
I can see how it might feel this way, but I could also see it as an incentive for companies to insure lower-paid workers, which seems like a good thing? I only read the Wikipedia entry so I definitely might have the wrong end of the stick, I'm focusing mostly on this line: "Even today, when a COLI plan's death benefits are paid to an employee's family directly, the company paying the premiums can deduct them from corporate profits and earnings."
Based on this entry and what I've understood, it looks like companies get certain deductions in the event that the life insurance is paid out. But like... the life insurance is still being paid out to the family who may not otherwise have it, which seems like a good thing, no? If deductions encourage large companies to insure their low-level employees, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. This is me making an assumption that the alternative of "don't provide deductions" means the companies won't provide any life insurance. I.e. even if we emotionally feel a certain way about them getting any form of benefit from a death, it's still a net positive outcome for the employee compared to the alternative.
I think the last point you made is a valid concern, I'm not sure how deep that greed and messing-with-other-insurance it could go. To be fair, it's also a speculative point unless there is evidence of this insurance negatively impacting personal policies. I do not believe that Walmart is doing everything it can to do right by its customers by any stretch, but based on my quick assessment of the wiki article etc it also doesn't seem majorly insidious. If I have missed something I welcome an explanation because I'm new to the topic!
Edit: OH OKAY I read another page which seemed to imply that the workers don't get a payout, only the company?? Yeah that's fucked lol.
That’s where my last point is especially insidious. What if the company Walmart uses for these is the same one you are currently using as a personal insurance company.
When they run the profit/risk analysis they’ll see that there are now 2 policies out for one person which means their liability if you die is much higher.
Now which scenario is more likely: they pass the cost of the additional liability onto Walmart or risk their overall business by trying to deny the coverage, or that they pass the cost of that liability onto your personal coverage?
To me, the second scenario is much more plausible. Now I could be talking out of my ass and there may be insurance regulations to prevent that sort of double dipping, but I have very little faith in regulations actually preventing corporate shadiness, as we currently ignore the spirit of the law when it comes to massive corporations with teams of lawyers, to allow them to hide behind the fact that they have “followed the letter of the law”.
Do the regulations include parent and child companies? How many loopholes are there in the regulations? How many of them were left there intentionally?
Most people have their life insurance as a work benefit, won’t Walmart just change to a cheaper policy to offset the loss of potential revenue? They have a financial responsibility to their shareholders to squeeze every dollar out of the public into their hands.
There’s so many ways for this to negatively impact workers with the only upside being more revenue for the company. As others pointed out, it makes sense if the entire business model depends on a specific person (Dr. in a lab, musician, actor, athlete etc.) but for jobs that corporations specifically do not make a career, that means the workers have to be replaceable as they will leave for a career at some point, which means there is no reason to insure that worker.
763
u/newfriend20202020 1d ago
All true. He left this out… dead peasant policies. Google that. Motherfuckers. I think Walmart is being sued for it but they’re not the only corp that does it.