Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [63]
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.
And what does Corporate America privately call this special form of life insurance?
Dead Peasants Insurance.
That’s right. “Dead Peasants.” Because that’s 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, 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.
Still not convinced that the rich could care less about you? Here’s another example of just how little you mean to your corporate masters once they’ve got your vote and your obedience. Congress is considering a bill that will let companies put less money into your pension funds if you work in a blue-collar job because, they say, as a result of the filthy, unsafe working conditions they’ve created for you, you aren’t going to live that long anyway. So companies don’t need to really be planning to give you all your retirement money because, heck, you ain’t going to be around to use it! You’ll be dead because they didn’t install enough ventilation or they made you work so hard you’ll be lucky if you’re not coughing up blood by the time you’re fifty-eight. So why make them set aside all this pension money for you?
What’s even more disgusting about this legislation is that it is backed by unions such as the UAW who want to see the pension money used now in the form of higher wages for their workers. But the numbers don’t add up: Blue-collar workers who are union members actually live longer than nonunion industrial workers because they are paid better and have good health benefits. People with more money who have access to health care tend to stick around longer in this life and thus need more, not less, money put into pensions to support them during their lengthy retirements.
The third example of how expendable you are comes