Betting on Death: The Dark History of Dead Peasant Insurance

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 portf...