Forms, Labels and Usability

I received some interesting feedback on a website I was working on. It's a form heavy site where the employees, as they get new customers and leads, enter the information into the database. The forms were designed with the labels right-aligned. The creative team liked it because it looked better. The business owners signed off on it for the same reason.

However, we started to get complaints from the users that "the forms were hard to use." In the end it was decided that left-aligned labels were "easier to read" than were right-aligned labels.

Personally I find the right-aligned text more visually appealing and I don't find the left-aligned text "easier to read." But that doesn't really mean much, does it?