There is no real risk to the company when non-executive employees or former employees die, so there is no traditional or perhaps even legitimate reason to buy life insurance on them. This suggests that company-owned life insurance (COLI, in industry jargon) is mainly a tool to allow companies to speculate in financial markets.2. Consider the Hobby Lobby decision.
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What do the employees get? Banks and companies say the earnings from the policies are used to cover long term health care, pension obligations and deferred compensation. But in many cases they can use the tax free-gains however they want.
One thing that people always seem to forget when contraception comes into the picture is that health insurance is part of your compensation from your employer. It's not a gift, freebie, or bonus that your employer grants you out of the goodness of their heart. It's something you earn by working, same as your paycheck. The Supreme Court saying that Hobby Lobby or any other employer can choose not to provide certain benefits, for whatever reason, is tantamount to saying that your employer can dictate how you spend your paycheck. Just one of the problems with tying health insurance to employment in the first place.
We refuse to adequately fund a social safety net in this country. Meanwhile, pro-business lawmakers are hard at work bolstering corporate rights at the expense of workers' rights. The result? Workers who are increasingly dependent on employers, and employers with more and more control over workers' lives. It's not a big leap from control to ownership.
3. Personal anecdote time: I worked for a big-box retailer for several months when I was 18 years old. At the time, I was between high school and college, living with my parents at home.
As an aside, I applied for the job twice: the first time, before my 18th birthday, I never received a response. I applied again after I turned 18, and got an interview. When I told the interviewer I had applied before, she said, "Oh, I'm glad you came back!" and told me that they basically never hired anyone under 18, since the rules for how much and when minors could be made to work were more restrictive. Not that this was stated anywhere in the information for applicants, of course. So, yeah, one more data point against the idea that most people working minimum-wage jobs are high schoolers working on the side who don't really "need" a living wage. Companies won't hire high schoolers precisely because employees with priorities other than work are inconvenient for them. Not so long as they can find plenty of adults who need those same hourly wages, which in the current economy, they definitely can.
Anyway. It wasn't a bad job, but one thing I always disliked was the unspoken idea that to be a good employee meant being loyal, enthusiastic, flexible, going above and beyond. Never mind that many/most of the employees were working part-time for minimum wage and no benefits. Doing the work you were paid for wasn't enough; you were supposed to act as if the opportunity to do that work was the greatest privilege imaginable.
At the time, I couldn't have articulated it as such; maybe I did have a "bad attitude", I thought. But in retrospect, I see this kind of corporate propaganda as truly insidious. There is something insulting and coercive about it when your employer pays you less than a living wage and wants your utter loyalty in return. It's not empowering to talk about employees as "team members" when "teamwork" is only used as a cudgel to enforce compliance. It's one more way of obscuring the logical link between labor and compensation, and the fact that companies depend on workers for their existence, not the other way around.
(See also: In the Name of Love, by Miya Tokumitsu, which got my gears spinning on some of this.)
To repeat: Companies depend on workers. Employers owe their employees. As a culture, we need to remember that, and as a country, we need laws that reflect that.
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