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, http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/insurance/p64954.asp).

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.

Take the following examples of how this all turns into reality for workers and their families:

Jane St. John had two children and was pregnant with a third when her husband, a butcher at a Winn-Dixie store, was killed in an auto accident. When the Killeen, Texas, woman called the company to ask about insurance, she said she was told about a $17,500 policy to which she was entitled. St. John said Winn-Dixie told her nothing about the $102,000 the company collected from a corporate-owned policy on his life. She found out about it this summer, eight years after his death, from a lawyer who researched court records. The idea that the company would secretly insure lives, and then not share the benefits with the families, “is sick,” she said. “That is creepy.”

Mike Rice was a 48-year-old assistant manager when he died of a massive heart attack at the Wal-Mart store in Tilton, N.H. His widow, Vicki, became the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the company after she discovered Wal-Mart collected $300,000 from a life insurance policy it owned on him. Vicki Rice believes job-related stress contributed to the heart attack and says it is totally immoral for Wal-Mart to profit from his death.

No one knows how many corporate-owned policies are issued on executives versus rank-and-file workers. Wal-Mart alone had taken out about 350,000 such policies between 1993 and 1996. Nestle USA had policies on 18,000 workers in 2002, The Wall Street Journal reported. Enron had $500 million in policies on workers (ibid).

There are two large issues that public interest groups and survivors speak of when they look at these death policies.

• Whether the companies had an insurable interest in their employees’ lives.
• Whether the companies were required to get the employees permission for the policies.

‘Insurable interest’ is essential in determining insurance claims for the issue is to make sure whoever is buying life insurance does not have an incentive for bumping off the insured. Therefore, insurers usually require that purchasers have a strong familial or emotional connection to the people being insured, or at least that they would suffer significant financial losses if the insured people died.

However all this changed in the 1980’s when the neo-liberal state allowed companies not to simply buy insurance for their executives, as had been done earlier, but loosened the regulations to include the ability of companies to buy insurance policies for all their employees.  Evidently the ‘strong emotional connection’ these companies had to their dead workers had to do with profit and greed, capital maximization and accumulation, or ‘suffering significant financial losses’ when the worker died and the surplus value dried up. The assumption underlying the horrific death insurance plan is that the workers ‘belong’ to the corporation – like peasants and serfs belonged to the lords and nobles.
As for seeking permission on behalf of the insured for purchase of these secret policies by corporations on their lives, most states have advise and consent laws.  These laws technically require companies to get a worker’s permission before buying life insurance on their lives – ‘peasant permission’.  

Many businesses circumvent these laws as they do most laws intended to hold them accountable. In this case they do so by purchasing the dead peasant insurance in one of the states that does not require notice, counsel or consent.  These state ‘death peasant insurance’ havens include Delaware, Georgia, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont. This basically means employees’ lives can be insured by contracting them out to insurance companies in rogue states that allow for the dead peasant insurance practices without any permission or counsel with and from the employee, nor any knowledge on the behalf of the worker.  These are ‘secret’ insurance policies and the employees and their loved ones may never even know if the corporation has taken a policy out on them or have collected insurance benefits when they pass. They may never find out if the corporations cash in the policies upon the worker’s death and then transfer the ‘janitor’ funds into corporate profits, retirement pay for the living but soon to be indemnified dead, or whether they just use the money for their own bonuses, perks and million dollar lifestyles.

According to attorney Mike Myers of Houstons McClanahan & Clearman, a firm which represents survivors suing companies over corporate-owned policies, the companies try their hardest to keep the life insurance policies they take out on workers secret.

Myers noted:
“Executives fly to Atlanta to meet with the insurance company and its brokers, sign some papers, get on their respective corporate jets and fly home”.

Myers went on to indicate that other corporate companies also get around the law by offering their workers typically small policies — $5,000 to $10,000.  This then serves as an incentive to allow larger corporate-owned policies to be issued on the workers lives by corporate insurance companies. The trick is that the small policies can later be canceled, even if the company keeps up the premiums on the ‘dead peasant’ insurance (ibid). 

Jack Dolan, spokesman for the insurance trade group the American Council of Life Insurers (ACL, a business ‘union’) admitted that anger about these practices will turn the burner up on needed reforms to stop the ghoulish practice.  This might even include restricting a company’s ability to write death policies on rank-and-file workers.  Most likely what Congress will do, at the very least, is to force companies to get their peasant’s consent before buying any new policies.  Corporations most likely will also have to clearly disclose that the coverage may extend past the time the worker leaves the company, which is incredibly the case now.  This is touted by the coin-operated politicians and their lobby constituents as a huge step in the right direction, but it leaves intact the whole graveyard gimmick of insuring giving up the ghost.

Acknowledging that laws may change, Dolan doggedly rejected the idea that corporate-owned ‘dead peasant’ life insurance was immoral or that a company might bet against its workers – hoping they would die so they could pocket the insurance.  From Dolan’s point of view:

”It’s an important business.  Companies are using it for extremely valid reasons” (ibid).

Yes indeed and the valid reason is greed and profit maximization, pure and simple, and an economic and social system that creates the material conditions for this type of predation.  That is why the coin-operated politicians are courted by lobbyists for the insurance industry.  Lax regulations are good, but no regulations are better and insurance kindly regulation is even more welcome.

It’s a Donner party now under capitalism.   Those who own the means of production are now fully in charge of who draw straws to see who eats whom first.  Dog eat dog could hardly describe the deracinated policies of these corporate crime syndicates who even in death, will posthumously exploit you, rummage through your pockets, collect benefits on your life through secret insurance policies and perhaps one day even trade your body parts for cash.

Arguably we are now entering a world of Soylent Green (a 1973 science fiction film directed by Richard Fleischer. Starring Charlton Heston.  The film overlays the police procedural and science fiction genres as it depicts the investigation into the brutal murder of a wealthy businessman in a dystopian future suffering from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans and a hot climate due to the greenhouse effect.  In the movie, much of the population survives on processed food rations, including (“soylent green”.)   You can see the trailer on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVpN312hYgU).

As we become compost for the new Soylent Green Economy we become more and more simply a means to an end for corporate profit.  When we die we simply become re-exploited by the necrophilic capitalists.  This vivid dystopian vision is not science fiction anymore.  It has arrived on our doorstep and is now the stark reality of a Hobbsian post-modern serfdom. 

Capitalism is a vicious economic and social system where life is as cheap as death and death is a profitable as ever.  The next time you hear about ‘death taxes’ or ‘death panels’ by corporate sophists ask them, “What about the dead peasant or dead janitor insurance policies and why can’t workers take out dead CEO insurance policies?  After all, this would serve to ‘boost’ the economy as well, wouldn’t it”?