Speaking before thousands of working people gathered on Wall St. to protest the insatiable greed and criminality of corporate executives, John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, demanded a series of changes in the nation's laws and business practices to restore confidence in the financial world.

Under a blazing sun outside the New York Stock Exchange July 30, the union leader said he would meet that afternoon with Dick Grasso, President of the Exchange, and Henry Paulson, chief executive officer of Goldman-Sachs, a major brokerage and finance institution, to discuss ways to bring labor and business together to effect these changes.

Standing under the slogan of "No More Business as Usual," Sweeney and former Worldcom, Enron and Andersen workers called on companies to stop corporate malfeaseance and stop cheating and exploiting their employees.

The AFL-CIO president denounced Washington politicians for doing too little to protect the millions of workers who lost their jobs and their retirement savings with the collapse of firm after firm.

"The stock market loses $7 trillion in value as the White House drags its feet and Congress refuses to rescind the $1.6 trillion tax break they gave the same CEOs who are now stealing us blind," Sweeney insisted.

He condemned recent revelations of business thefts as "an unbelievable story of corporate criminals wrecking the lives and retirement dreams of millions of working families and flaunting their ill-gotten gains in our faces."

Sweeney cited Enron CEO Ken Lay paying himself and other executives bonuses of $100 million, "even as he cheats thousands of employees and stockholders out of their jobs and their savings."

He added, "We witness the spectacle of Gary Winnick, the CEO of Global Crossing, selling off $743 million in stock while urging his employees to buy more, and then using the money to purchase a $92 million mansion in Bel Air."

He asserted that American consumers can shop with more confidence of quality at the local grocery that they can for equities on the stock market, and can depend more on the Lottery than on their employers for decency, fairness and security.

He outlined five steps that must be taken to restore confidence in the market. The first would require the Securities and Exchange Commission and all major stock exchanges to adopt a single higher standard for publicly traded corporations.

That standard must require companies to expense and index stock options they give CEOs, or ban them outright, he insisted.

It must also prohibit CEOs from selling their company stock while they are in office, and outlaw offshore tax havens.

He added that it must also "give workers and their pension funds the real power to choose corporate directors so we can replace the yes-men and women and the rubber-stampers with genuinely independent directors."

Sweeney told the cheering audience that the AFL-CIO would file suit for the 17,000 laid-off WorldCom workers to get severance pay they are owed -- "and we will win for them just as we won $34 million for the Enron workers."

The AFL-CIO president also insisted that labor will demand "political accountability" to change the way business is conducted, using the influence of 40 million people in union households "to change the way business is done in Washington."

Beginning this month, he said, "the AFL-CIO will be publicly linking corporate criminals with their congressional co-conspirators while those members of Congress are home in their districts."

And on Labor Day, he said, "we will launch the most aggressive effort in our history to replace anti-worker members of Congress with men and women who reject insiders and special interests and put people first."

The rally was part of a national campaign by the AFL-CIO and its member unions to hold CEO and corporations accountable, abolish stock options for corporate leaders, secure retirement security of all workers and demand meaningful pension reform.

Workers' retirement funds represent over 20 percent of stock ownership and losses over the past year have been estimated at over $800 billion.