Walt Disney hopes Mickey dies soon.

Jeff said:
My employer pays me a salary, but also spends a ton of money on my family's health care and relocated me 2,400 milles at great expense.

We get it Jeff. Microsoft is amazing.... :)

Don't be a hater. We have an IT department too.

I am wondering about the URL of the list referenced in the first post. If it's here, I see Hershey Foods Corporation. Hersheypark is owned by Hershey Entertainment and Resorts, though-- a different company all together. In fact, Hershey Foods Corporation is now the Hershey Company, so I wonder about the timliness of the list.

Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story skewers the dead peasant practice (keying in on Wal-Mart as well as a middle manager from a bank).

He only tells one side of the story, though. It certainly sounds cold and ruthless, but it's not as if the company hadn't taken out the policy that the family would have gotten the money. Moore explains that you're not allowed to take a fire insurance policy on a neighbor's house because then you would have an incentive to torch the place, but it's not as if these companies are actually out to kill any of its hires (which would be far more expensive and with criminal implications).

If anything, at least the policy encourages hiring activity. The amounts may seem flabbergasting, but you can just as quickly blame the insurance companies and their actuary tables. Besides, when a Wal-Mart employee dies ON the job with Wal-Mart potentially culpable (as in the Black Friday employee in the Northeast that got trampled a year ago), I'm pretty sure many of the families try to sue Wal-Mart for MORE than the policy is worth.

Brian Noble said:

Well, sure, we'd all like to get paid more. But, from the company's point of view, it was a straight investment, and never meant to be compensation or an employee benefit in any form. The alternative wasn't paying the husbands more, increasing their health insurance coverage, etc. The alternative was investing the money on behalf of the business in some other way.

I don't disagree. But people get wired up when they hear of things like this, seeing it as further "proof" that corporations are greedy and exploitative. They feel the company is making more profit at the employees' expense, even though they aren't.

Count me as one who thinks the whole thing is a little creepy. Especially when applied to low level employees whose death won't mean much if any financial hardship for the company.

Maybe if it was a different type of insurance it would not sit so sourly with me. I can appreciate the viability of such a policy if one is discussing a top-level creative force behind a corporation; that is, it is clear that the loss of such an individual, especially unexpectedly, will undoubtedly result in a severe hardship for the company which would in turn effect all of the other employees.

That's what life insurance is for. A family member's death has a catastrophic effect on everyone in the family system, and it is meant to help fill a temporary vacuum until roles can be shifted and, hopefully, the family can locate another source of income (if the breadwinner was lost).

However, unlike a family, a company can hire someone else who performs the same task...a family can never "re-hire" a lost loved one.

Further, it seems evident that such policies are indeed not just taken out on employees such as the aforementioned; it would appear that they are also taken out in order to assist companies in meeting the proverbial bottom line; in other words, profit (when one considers that a host of low level employees (your proverbial "dead peasants") means a big tax break).
And you're correct; the way some corporations choose to conduct themselves is exactly why people get "wired up" by stuff like this.

OhioStater said:
However, unlike a family, a company can hire someone else who performs the same task...a family can never "re-hire" a lost loved one.

Yeah, and it costs a significant amount of money to hire someone. Think about it - relocation, reams of company literature, meetings with higher-ups/lower-downs/to-the-sides, lots of HR man-hours and maybe a month or so of relatively little value added to the company, until the new hire gets rolling. And that's not even taking into account the money spent finding the new hire, which is also not an insignificant expense by any stretch.

I agree on those points; and I think we're talking about the higher-up creative forces like I mentioned in my previous post in those cases. Like I said, I can see the viability for the policies in that regard, but these policies come in two forms.

Just as some context, I'm a faculty member; I understand first-hand how much the process of hiring someone actually costs. Incidentally, if I was approached by my university and they explained that my loss would be so detrimental to them that they are taking out a policy on me I would have no problem with that.

The peasant policies are not being purchased to cover the risk of loss of the employee. The types of employees being covered by these policies probably do not stay with the company very long even if they do not die so there is no investment in the employee that the company is seeking to protect. They are being purchased as an investment. Companies have a range of investment opportunities and this is one of them. Tax benefits made the investments attractive to many companies in terms of return on investment. Take away the tax benefits and I suspect that the appeal of these investments drops significantly.