The AFSCME Employees Pension Plan, a large U.S. public employee pension plan, has released its list of shareholder proposals submitted for company annual meetings in spring 2006 and outlined its program for holding corporate America accountable to shareholders.

“This coming proxy season our priority is to restrain excessive and undeserved executive compensation,” said Gerald McEntee, chairman of the AFSCME Employees Pension Plan. “For too long shareholders have paid the price for over-compensated executives who don’t deliver for the company. The bad apples that mismanage their companies — and even sometimes break the law — must be stopped.”

The core of the AFSCME Plan’s program is to improve shareholder value by subjecting CEO pay to board accountability and suggesting that companies adopt a practice that is required of publicly traded companies in the UK, where all executive pay packages are subject to an advisory shareholder vote.

“At companies with poor pay-for-performance histories, there ought to be a majority vote of directors,” McEntee said. “We need more accountable directors to crack down on companies that pay executives more than they deserve.”

The AFSCME Plan has submitted proposals at 26 companies and they include: advisory shareholder votes on executive compensation reports; programs to align executive compensation with shareholders’ interests; procedures for recouping solicitation expenses in proxy contests that do not seek board control, so that shareholders have a real opportunity to replace failed directors; binding bylaw amendments that establish majority vote requirements for director elections; and, annual election of directors.

Proposals have been filed at 3M, American Express, American International Group, Amgen, Bank of America, Bank of New York, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Citigroup, Countrywide Financial, Emerson Electric, FMC Technologies, Home Depot, Honeywell, JP Morgan Chase, Mellon Financial, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Qwest, Raytheon, SunTrust Banks, Time Warner, United Technologies, US Bancorp, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, and Wells Fargo .