What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel

Author:Michael J. Sandel [Sandel, Michael J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

4

Markets in Life and Death

Michael Rice, forty-eight, an assistant manager at a Walmart in Tilton, New Hampshire, was helping a customer carry a television to her car when he had a heart attack and collapsed. He died a week later. An insurance policy on his life paid out about $300,000. But the money did not go to his wife and two children. It went to Walmart, which had purchased the policy on Rice’s life and named itself as the beneficiary.1

When his widow, Vicki Rice, learned of Walmart’s windfall, she was outraged. Why should the company be able to profit from her husband’s death? He had worked long hours for the company, sometimes as much as eighty hours a week. “They used Mike terribly,” she said, “and then they go out and collect $300,000? It’s very immoral.”2

According to Mrs. Rice, neither she nor her husband had any idea that Walmart had taken out a life insurance policy on him. When she learned of the policy, she sued Walmart in federal court, claiming that the money should go to the family, not the company. Her attorney argued that corporations should not be able to profit from the death of their workers: “It is absolutely reprehensible for a giant like Wal-Mart to be gambling on the lives of its employees.”3

A Walmart spokesman acknowledged that the company held life insurance policies on hundreds of thousands of its employees—not only on assistant managers but even on maintenance workers. But he denied that this amounted to profiting from death. “It is our contention that we did not benefit from the death of our associates,” he said. “We had a considerable investment in these employees” and came out ahead “if they continued to live.” In the case of Michael Rice, the spokesman argued, the insurance payout was not a welcome windfall but compensation for the cost of training him and, now, of replacing him. “He had been given quite a bit of training and gained experiences that cannot be duplicated without costs.”4

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