Long before the corporate abuses of Enron, the Central Pension Fund had been an active participant in the move to require greater corporate responsibility. That activism continued throughout the just completed round of annual corporate shareholder meetings.

Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Adelphia, ImClone, Arthur Anderson. As the rogues gallery of corporate fraud in America continues to grow, the retirement security of tens of thousands of workers employed by those companies has evaporated. However, the precipitous decline in the U.S. stock market produced by those corporate scandals has also threatened the pension security of millions of other American workers.

Accordingly, in July of this year President John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO went to Wall Street to announce an agenda for corporate accountability to protect the jobs and pensions of American workers from further corporate abuse. It is an agenda calling for action by Congress and corporations themselves to restore confidence in corporate America. Only with the return of such confidence will the retirement security of our nation's workforce be protected.

The AFL-CIO's agenda for corporate reform consists of four broad components:

First: Put Workers First

Workers who lose their jobs should have first claim on the assets of companies destroyed by corporate misconduct, for severance claims as well as unpaid wages, benefits and pension contributions. To help assure this, the ill-gotten gains of corrupt corporate insiders must be seized and returned to the victims of corporate abuse.

This component of the agenda also calls upon corporate America to restore traditional defined benefit plans --- such as the Central Pension Fund --- as the primary retirement plans for their employees, and utilize 401(k) savings plans only as a supplement to such plans.

Second: Hold CEOs Accountable

CEOs should be prohibited from selling any of their shares of stock in their company, or options on such stock, so long as they are employed by the company. This will prohibit the "pump and dump" tactics that has been found repeatedly in the recent corporate scandals where, just prior to the corporations' collapse, their top officers pumped up the share price for their stock and then unloaded it before its value plummeted --- leaving all of the other shareholders holding the bag.

This component of the AFL-CIO agenda also calls for corporate boards to be composed of truly independent outside directors elected by the shareholders, without management being permitted to spend corporate funds to campaign for the election of their hand-picked cronies. In connection with these elections, giant mutual funds should be required to disclose how they are casting the votes of their shares so that they cannot develop cozy relationships with the corporate boards that they should be monitoring.

Third: Put Integrity Back Into Corporations and Capital Markets

This component of the AFL-CIO's agenda calls for the elimination of the conflicts of interest among accountants and Wall Street financial analysts that have aided and abetted corporate corruption. The accounting reforms adopted by Congress eliminate the incentive for accountants to overlook phony bookkeeping to retain lucrative consulting contracts. But these same reforms should be extended to eliminate the incentive for Wall Street analysts to make rosy recommendations concerning corporate stock in order to obtain lucrative investment banking business from those same corporations. A national commission should be established to study regulation and oversight of investment and commercial banks and their increasing concentration of financial power.

Fourth: End Corporate Corruption of Politics

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the AFL-CIO agenda for corporate accountability calls for the elimination of the undue influence and power exerted by corporations over our political system by moving to full public financing of election campaigns. Politicians cannot be expected to objectively evaluate legislative proposals to rein in the activities of corporations when they must rely on the contributions of those same corporations and corporate executives to finance their election campaigns.

At the end of the day, the disastrous effects of this wave of corporate scandal may finally bring about a national consensus for the kind of reforms that are essential to properly protect the jobs and pensions of America's workers.