Most employers know that rewarding their best workers is good business. However, the “return” on such investment is difficult to measure, and wise employers think long and hard about two of their largest expense items – employee benefits and executive compensation. Today in the United States, under the glare of issues raised by the current financial crisis, company-sponsored benefits programs have become mere shadows of what they once were, and executive compensation has come under intense scrutiny to the point where the Treasury Department monitors it at companies receiving federal assistance. In recognition of the growing importance of employee benefits and executive compensation issues, the Center for Labor and Employment Law at New York University School of Law dedicated New York University’s 59th Annual Conference on Labor to an in-depth examination of these topics. This volume of the proceedings of the 2006 conference contains papers presented at that meeting, all here updated to reflect recent developments. It also includes contributions from other practitioners and academics with extensive knowledge and experience in this specialized field of labor and employment law.

The politics of business have become the business of politics. Across the world the lesson is clear: just as too much governmental interference leads to dysfunctional economies, left to its own devices the market is incapable of adequate self-regulation. The corporate malfeasance crisis in the United States has transformed global perceptions about the efficacy of regulatory structures in combating corrupt practices in private and public sectors. The design of effective corporate governance structures depends not just on internal factors but also on the inter-relationship between various actors that constitute wider governance: politicians, lobbyists, corporations and regulators. A Corrupted State: Wall Street on Trial breaks new ground by deconstructing the systemic flaws inherent in the model itself. It reveals that the 'rotten apple' theory, positing the problems in corporate America as merely the result of deviancy by an individual or a single firm, is an intellectual deceit not supported by the facts.