Steven Holt: “It is really quite simple. We have learned some very simple lessons; perhaps we should have learned them a long time…”

“It is really quite simple. We have learned some very simple lessons; perhaps we should have learned them a long time ago, but we certainly should learn them now in light of Enron. The employees have been left holding the bag, while the corporate executives, sometimes in a very duplicitous way, walk away with their options, walk away with their bundles. We have such a good opportunity here to get things right. But the bill before us, the underlying bill, fails to give employees notice when executives are dumping company stock. It fails to hold the plan fiduciaries accountable and limits the ability of the employees to collect damages resulting from misconduct under the pension plan. It denies employees a spot on the pension board. How simple could that be? Yet the bill fails to do that. Mr. Speaker, it also continues special treatment of executives. In other words, executives could continue to have their savings set aside and protected through their stock options and so forth when a company fails, while rank and file would be at the end of the line in bankruptcy holding this empty bag. Perhaps most important, it fails to give employees early control of their assets. Anybody's standard financial advice would be to diversify, and yet the employees are denied the opportunity to diversify for at least 5 years under the underlying bill.”