Written by Danny Weil dailycensored.com | the new soylent green economy
‘Dead janitors’ or ‘dead peasants’ insurance: corporations buy secret non-disclosed life insurance policies on their workers when workers ‘give up the ghost’
There is nothing that is sacred under the organized system of greed known as capitalism. Everything produced and sold under the ruthless arrangement that puts profits before people must be commodified and cannibalized quickly, and at any cost. Take life insurance, a commodity peddled by hucksters for more than a century. The insurance has now taken a new twist. Companies are purchasing insurance policies that will pay them a secret, windfall benefit when you die and you might not even know it. The money will not go to your loved ones but to the corporation.
The commodification of death under capitalism goes unbridled. One lives to survive, not survive to live and the legal ownership of life goes on unabated.
These life insurance policies, are often nicknamed ‘dead janitors’ or ‘dead peasants’ insurance, and they have increased in popularity after many states cleared the way for them by relaxing insurance regulations and passing new ones favorable to the body snatchers.
The practice accelerated during the Reagan years. Congress recently tried to crack down on the practices, but they faced the howls of the insurance industry — which earlier this year managed to derail reforms intended to stop or regulate them through multi-million dollar lobbying efforts, perhaps paid for with death peasant’s insurance benefits.
This dirty little secret may not have been on your radar screen but it certainly is firmly locked into the rifle sites of companies that want you dead so they can collect insurance benefits on your corpse without your knowledge. The companies can then use the death benefits to pay for higher CEO salaries, more perks for upper management or even to pay for retirement benefits for the living’. Compost compounded daily.
If this sounds like a scene out of a B-rated horror film, it is. It is capitalism. But the facts themselves do not lie so let’s take a look at them.
- Companies pay a whopping $8 billion in premiums each year for such coverage, according to the American Council of Life Insurers, a trade group.
- The policies make up more than 20% of the all the life insurance sold each year.
- Companies expect to reap more than $9 billion in tax breaks from these policies over the next five years. The policies are treated as whole life policies. So, companies can borrow against the policies (though the IRS won’t let them write off the interest). And the death benefits are tax-free (MSN, Liz Pulliam Weston, moneycentral.msn.com).
Labor leaders and some lawmakers have denounced the policies as not simply unjust but morally reprehensible and repulsive. The companies refute this, arguing that profits from the policies can help offset the increased cost of employee benefits and enhance the businesses bottom lines. The labor leaders and lawmakers seem to counter argue with inaction at best, a wink and a nod at worst. Little has been done to curb the practices of the ‘death peasant insurance’ that vests its interest in your early but permanent ‘retirement’.
Exploitation is the key principle of capitalist social relations of production. It is an economic system whereby capital employs workers and then takes a portion of what they produce as ‘surplus labor’ or profits. This is wage-slavery, a system where workers sell or rent their labor to capital while producing more in value than is reflected in their benefits or pay. The ‘surplus’ is taken by the corporations as profit and then paid out to a small class of investors and CEO’s. This is the cornerstone of how profits are created and then accumulated under capitalism. Now with your dead body worth often more than the cost of paying benefits or health insurance for your life, James Cain’s sultry novel Double Indemnity takes on an even more hideous noir.
Hundreds of companies — including Dow Chemical, Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart, Walt Disney and Winn-Dixie –purchase dead peasant insurance on more than 6 million rank-and-file workers in the United States