Some major companies are boosting the value of retirement plans for top executives by using a generous formula when converting a pension into a single lump-sum payment.

The practice, which remained largely unknown until a recent change in federal disclosure requirements, can increase the value of a CEO's pension by 10% to 40%, sometimes amounting to millions of extra dollars. The additional sums aren't always fully reflected in annual pension-benefit tables included in proxy statements, or in company financial statements, due to the complexities of accounting and disclosure rules.

The way this works is pretty simple: CEOs try to walk away with a lump sum payout of their gargantuan pension benefits at a very favorable interest rate--something most workers can't do. It's a nice scam.

Of course, the rest of us don't have that comfort:

While some executives' benefits are being enhanced, millions of Americans are worried about the security of their own retirement funds. The stock-market plunge has caused a decline in the value of many 401(k)-style accounts, which are primary savings vehicles for about 50 million U.S. workers. Benefit levels in many regular pension plans have been frozen.

It's even worse than that: Since 1978, the number of defined-benefit plans (meaning, real pensions where you can count on a set amount of money no matter what greedy Wall Street traders do) plummeted from 128,041 plans covering some 41 percent of private-sector workers to only 26,000 today (source: Employee Benefit Research Institute). Only 21 percent of workers in the private sector have defined-benefit pensions. The vast amounts of pension recipients are Union Members with a Contract.

Almost half of the people with pensions today don't have them through their companies they work for--basically, because the CEOs are taking whatever cash is left on the table.

It is not a right, but a privilege to be a Union Member.

Wear Red on Thursdays and Stay Strong in the Struggle.