The Enron “outrage,” AFL-CIO president John Sweeney told a rapt crowd of several hundred workers at Milwaukee’s Serb Memorial Hall, is “not the story of one corporation’s abuses, but sadly it’s an example of business as usual in boardrooms and executive suites all across the country.” Over the coming months, at a series of town-hall meetings around America, the AFL-CIO will warn workers that they, too, could be “Enroned,” and it will call for “no more business as usual.”
In an unprecedented way, argues AFL-CIO corporate affairs director Ron Blackwell, the Enron scandal “opens up a channel of public discourse on issues of retirement security and corporate accountability.” In the booming nineties nobody wanted to hear why corporations and capital markets had to be better regulated, and reformers were left pleading for corporations to be “socially responsible.” But today, “new economy” job-hoppers as much as steelworkers have good reasons to listen to union warnings about deeply flawed 401(k) plans and Social Security privatization.
The labor movement helped win millions in severance pay for laid-off Enron workers, provided legal counsel for workers battling Enron’s creditors, sued Enron executives (through union-affiliated Amalgamated Bank) on behalf of pension funds that lost hundreds of millions of dollars in Enron’s collapse and helped ex-Enron workers–both union and nonunion–tell Congress and the public how they were misused. The AFL-CIO requested new Securities and Exchange Commission rules and forced four Enron directors to withdraw from renomination at other corporate and public boards. Now labor is challenging Enron director Frank Savage’s renomination to Lockheed Martin’s board, sending the message that independent directors have a public trust.
Besides supporting auditor reform, the AFL-CIO is promoting legislation to strengthen the rights of workers in 401(k) plans–to a point. Senator Jon Corzine, backed by the Pension Rights Center, initially proposed prohibiting employees from holding more than 20 percent of their employer’s stock in their plans. But after complaints from unions representing some workers who had bet big with their employers’ stock, like pilots and GE employees, the AFL-CIO backed Senator Ted Kennedy’s legislation, which places a less stringent limit on the employees’ 401(k) holdings of their employers’ stock but which, quite importantly, would require equal worker and employer representation in governing the plans. Enron worker Dary Ebright, who lost $300,000 from his 401(k), argues that limits make sense. “If that had been in place,” he said in Milwaukee, “I wouldn’t be here today.”
Sweeney hopes that unions can use votes on Enron-related reforms to draw lines in this year’s elections showing what candidates put first–corporations or workers. The AFL-CIO attacked Republican Representative John Boehner’s legislation, passed in April, for “wip[ing] out existing retirement protections for workers under the guise of responding to” Enron. The House bill would permit investment firms to advise workers about financial products, like mutual funds, from which those firms profit–precisely the kind of 1990s conflict of interest that is under investigation at several Wall Street brokerages. While providing limited protections for workers and preserving executive privileges, the House bill would also make it easier for corporations to exclude most employees from retirement plans. Labor’s advocacy for Enron workers and retirement security could also strengthen organizing, including efforts among white-collar workers, by sparking a more “enlightened” view of a collective voice at work, as it did with former Enron vice president Dennis Vegas, now a union enthusiast.
But a budding labor scandal threatens the movement’s credibility on corporate accountability. It appears that a few labor leaders, sitting on the board of ULLICO, parent of Union Labor Life Insurance Company, personally profited from privileged deals in the Enronlike boom and bust of telecommunications upstart Global Crossing, while their unions’ pension funds were denied the same opportunity. Robert Georgine, president of ULLICO and former president of the AFL-CIO’s building and construction trades department, former Iron Workers president Jake West, Plumbers president Martin Maddaloni and Carpenters president Douglas McCarron are among those who got windfalls of several hundred thousand dollars. In March Sweeney, who did not take part in the deal, called on ULLICO, like Enron, to appoint an independent committee and counsel to investigate, but in mid-April Georgine said he would take a “somewhat different” approach. “We’re not going to ask Enron to live by one set of standards and ULLICO to live by another,” Sweeney insisted. Many union officials say they were shocked and disgusted by the news, a reminder that “no more business as usual” is a widely applicable slogan, even within union ranks.
