One year ago last week Enron declared bankruptcy.

That event, and the sickening fraud and bankruptcies of 2002 cost thousands of workers their jobs and retirement savings.

We learned in the ugliest ways how conflicts of interest destroy workers' savings.

· Conflicted auditors will knowingly compromise their so-called "independent" audits in exchange for million dollar consulting deals.

· Conflicted corporate boards will grant outrageous pay packages to company executives, even as the company's stock price plummets.

· And thanks to the courageous work of Eliot Spitzer, the New York State Attorney General, we learned that conflicted investment analysts pump up stocks that they think are junk in order to win investment banking business.

Today, we are supporting the Securities and Exchange Commission's effort to clean up another conflict of interest in our financial markets—the conflict that encourages mutual fund companies to use our money to be "yes-men" for corporate management in proxy votes.

Using our money, mutual funds have bought up more than one-fifth of U.S. corporate stocks.

Their sheer size makes mutual funds one of the most powerful forces in deciding who sits on corporate boards, how much the CEO takes home, and whether auditors are allowed to perform consulting on the side.

Workers' jobs and investors' savings hang in the balance in these elections, but the law blocks us from knowing how the mutual funds use our money.

Unfortunately, we suspect that mutual funds vote with management at the expense of our jobs and savings to win profitable deals on retirement accounts and selling other services.

Take Fidelity Investments, for example, the world's largest mutual fund company and one of the most influential investors in the global capital markets.

Fidelity earned $2 million in 401(k) management fees in 1999 from Tyco.

Meanwhile, Fidelity, as the largest investor in Tyco, used its huge financial stake in the company to defeat a proposal increasing the number of independent members on Tyco's board of directors -which we know Fidelity voted against - to possibly supporting a proposal to move the company headquarters to Bermuda.

With no disclosure or accountability, will Fidelity or any other mutual fund company, ever vote against management and risk a contract worth millions?

That's what investors need to know.

And that is why the AFL-CIO petitioned the SEC to adopt rules forcing mutual funds to disclose their proxy voting records. In September, the SEC proposed a comprehensive rule to require this disclosure.

The mutual fund industry says that investors don't want to know how they vote.

Well, they are wrong.

When the public comment period on the rule closed last Friday, more than 7500 individuals and organizations had sent comments to the SEC.

That's more comments than any other SEC proposal in history and virtually all voiced strong support for the rule.

But not the mutual fund industry.

They defended incentives for mutual funds to votes in their best interest at the expense of their shareholders' best interests.

We've seen before what happens when an industry quashes reform.

In 1998, former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt proposed accounting industry reform to ensure auditor independence.

But the industry gutted it, leaving in place inadequate accounting laws that let Enron and WorldCom happen.

That cannot happen again.

This week, President Bush nominated William Donaldson to succeed Harvey Pitt as SEC Chairman.

That nomination process will take some time, and that gives the mutual fund industry more time to lobby.

I say that disclosure is too important to wait for a new SEC Chairman.

Chairman Pitt has demonstrated very strong leadership on disclosing mutual fund proxy votes and I urge him and the Commission to stay the course, to resist the industry's corrosive lobbying, and to adopt this rule.

I want to introduce to you now David Bardin, an individual investor who supports the rule and is among the 7500 who commented to the SEC.