I can see there being a big difference in death rates between, say, an Alaskan crab fishing operation and a suburban CPA firm, but 'job' is one of the questions that's asked by life insurers so that's already accounted for.
How would a white collar office employer legally engineer a higher death rate for their people than an equivalent company down the street? Providing only fries and burgers in the canteen? Relocating to an office block near a chemical waste plant? Nothing really seems feasible or effective enough to make a measurable difference to the performance of the investment scheme. The added investment return bought by shortening the lives of some percentage of staff by a few years would be just noise compared to the tax savings this vehicle provides.
Should my employer be insured against my death? What about customers deaths? What about _potential_ customers deaths? What about events other than death?
Or to put it another way, in what way is insurance different than gambling?
Agreed. I think what a lot of people are uncomfortable about is that an employee's life is now a "tax-advantaged investment vehicle" for a company.
Anybody other than me commoditizing my life (and death) seems to lack human dignity.
If the employer is responsible for providing safety equipment, they shouldn't receive a payout from a failure of said safety equipment.
The company is just playing the odds. If they have thousands of employees, some of them will die naturally every year. The entire scheme is just to gain the tax advantages of life insurance from those natural deaths.
Even if it works the way you suggest, it is just a wealth transfer from the Federal Government to Life Insurance. That is almost as bad since it means its ultimately a transfer of tax burden from Capital to Labor.
A financial incentive [payout] from employee deaths is the opposite incentive you'd want for any business that is paying for any kind of safety equipment. You'd want an incentive for the opposite behavior which no one really offers.
https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owasrch_news_releases.searc...
You can regularly see companies being cited so "numerous" is reasonable.
I find this argument approximately as credible as the one that says that, having taken out a life insurance policy on employees, the company now has an incentive to have those employees murdered.
And again: aren't they disallowed from taking out policies on anyone outside the top 35% best paid employees? What are the OSHA concerns for office workers?
1) A significant number of employers pay the bare minimum for worker safety [hence OSHA violations being relevant, such companies clearly exist and some miscalculate. I doubt these people are malicious, merely misjudged the minimum]
2) Life insurance policies being paid out on employees creates further incentive to do the bare minimum to comply with OSHA. In addition to not having to spend additional $$s on safety training & equipment, you now also have an investment vehicle to reinforce this behavior.
3) Many companies have more than 65% of their workforce [construction for instance] doing work in situations that require safety training & equipment. The limitation is based on a payroll %.
I'm confused why this requires spelling out this verbosely, but there it is.
Notice how at no point am I saying any of the stuff you are claiming I am?
So I'm just confused how he could read it that way. But alright, I guess it is on me to be clearer then. :P