Betting on Death

Imagine dying, and your employer receives a million-dollar check, while your family gets nothing. For decades, major corporations like Walmart and Winn-Dixie took out life insurance policies on their low-level employees—janitors, cashiers, and clerks—without their knowledge. They called it "Corporate-Owned Life Insurance" (COLI). The industry called it "Dead Peasant Insurance." This explosive investigative book traces the history of how companies turned their workforce into a financial portfolio where an employee was worth more dead than alive. It explores the legal loopholes, the whistleblower cases, and the moral vacuum of a financial system that incentivized corporations to profit from the mortality of their own people. A chilling look at the intersection of actuarial science and human dignity.