Introduction
On August 8, 2025, I received a phone call from a man representing the Broadbent Institute, perhaps because I signed one of their petitions (I really do not remember if I did). The man tried to convince me that the institute worked for “positive change” (a cliche who used frequently). He then shifted his tone when I questioned whether the Institute was not social reformist (Ed Broadbent was former leader of the federal NDP and a social democrat). I pointed out that the Institute was connected to the NDP, which he denied (it may not be formally connected, but there is undoubtedly some informal links since they likely share the same ideology). He then became more hostile, blurting out with evident hostility that I then proposed revolution? I responded that the issue was not revolution but a radical change in social relations that are exploitative and oppressive.
He then shifted ground, insisting that I did not know anything about the Institute–in this, he was correct. I suspected that it was a social-democratic or social-reformist organization, but I had not really looked at the Institute in any depth. He then argued that the Institute sought “positive change,” such environmental change and proportional representation. I challenged his claim that the Institute could address the environmental crisis without challenging the class power of employers.
We both began to express ourselves heatedly, and he said he had to go back to work. I hung up on him.
This post will look at the cliches of the Broadbent Institute. Most of the bold-faced phrases are my emphases.
The Cliches of the Broadbent Institute
- From May 7, 2024 (https://perspectivesjournal.ca/contemporary-prospects-for-social-democracy/):
Contemporary Prospects for Social Democracy
What is decent work? Is decent work characterized by the following?
From Elizabeth Anderson, in her book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It), pages 37-39:
Communist Dictatorships in Our Midst
Imagine a government that assigns almost everyone a superior whom they must obey. Although superiors give most inferiors a routine to follow, there is no rule of law. Orders may be arbitrary and can change at any time, without prior notice or opportunity to appeal. Superiors are unaccountable to those they order around. They are neither elected nor removable by their inferiors. Inferiors have no right to complain in court about how they are being treated, except in a few narrowly defined cases. They also have no right to be consulted about the orders they are given.There are multiple ranks in the society ruled by this government. The content of the orders people receive varies, depending on their rank. Higher- ranked individuals may be granted considerable freedom in deciding how to carry out their orders, and may issue some orders to some inferiors. The most highly ranked individual takes no orders but issues many. The lowest-ranked may have their bodily movements and speech minutely regulated for most of the day.
This government does not recognize a personal or private sphere of autonomy free from sanction. It may prescribe a dress code and forbid certain hairstyles. Everyone lives under surveillance, to ensure that they are complying with orders. Superiors may snoop into inferiors’ e- mail and record their phone conversations.
Suspicionless searches of their bodies and personal effects may be routine. They can be ordered to submit to medical testing. The government may dictate the language spoken and forbid communication in any other language. It may forbid certain topics of discussion. People can be sanctioned for their consensual sexual activity or for their choice of spouse or life partner. They can be sanctioned for their political activity and required to engage in political activity they do not agree with.The economic system of the society run by this government is communist. The government owns all the nonlabor means of production in the society it governs. It organizes production by means of central planning. The form of the government is a dictatorship. In some cases, the dictator is appointed by an oligarchy. In other cases, the dictator is self- appointed.
Although the control that this government exercises over its members is pervasive, its sanctioning powers are limited. It cannot execute or imprison anyone for violating orders. It can demote people to lower ranks. The most common sanction is exile. Individuals are also free to emigrate, although if they do, there is usually no going back. Exile or emigration can have severe collateral consequences. The vast majority have no realistic option but to try to immigrate to another communist dictatorship, although there are many to choose from. A few manage to escape into anarchic hinterlands, or set up their own dictatorships.
This government mostly secures compliance with carrots. Because it controls all the income in the society, it pays more to people who follow orders particularly well and promotes them to higher rank. Because it controls communication, it also has a propaganda apparatus that often persuades many to support the regime. This need not amount to brainwashing. In many cases, people willingly support the regime and comply with its orders because they identify with and profit from it. Others support the regime because, although they are subordinate to some superior, they get to exercise dominion over inferiors. It should not be surprising that support for the regime for these reasons tends to increase, the more highly ranked a person is.
Would people subject to such a government be free? I expect that most people in the United States would think not. Yet most work under just such a government: it is the modern workplace, as it exists for most establishments in the United States. The dictator is the chief executive officer (CEO), superiors are managers, subordinates are workers. The oligarchy that appoints the CEO exists for publicly owned corporations: it is the board of directors. The punishment of exile is being fired. The economic system of the modern workplace is communist, because the government— that is, the establishment— owns all the assets,1 and the top of the establishment hierarchy designs the production plan, which subordinates execute. There are no internal markets in the modern workplace. Indeed, the boundary of the firm is defined as the point at which markets end and authoritarian centralized planning and direction begin.
Most workers in the United States are governed by communist dictatorships in their work lives.
This parallel of the power of communist (or fascist) dictators and the power of employers to dictate to workers is simply neglected by social-democratic reformers when they refer to “decent work.” Their own conception of what is decent and fair is so limited that they have little to say about the daily experiences of billions of workers worldwide.
They remind me of something which Karl Marx wrote long ago. From Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1: The Process of Production of Capital (page 91):
Perseus wore a magic cap so that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over our own eyes and ears so as to deny that there are any monsters.
The social-democratic left seek to hide the reality of our own lives from us–lives characterized by dictatorship in various ways (with some freedoms, to be sure, such as limited freedom of speech–depending on where you are located on this planet and your status within that locality).
- From the article, Alex Purdye, (September 2023–I do not provide any url since it is a pdf file, and I use Google pdf extension, which enables me to download the file directly). Canadian Grocery Profitability: Inflation, Wages and Financialization, page 5:
Recommendations
Strengthening organized labour helps ensure that when profit windfalls happen in an inflationary environment, that workers get fair wages.
Obtaining wages does not prevent management from controlling workers’ lives in various ways, ultimately enabling management to treat the workers as means for purposes undefined by the workers themselves (see The Money Circuit of Capital. For example, from that page:
“If we ignore the exchange process, we have the following: M1 … P … M2 (M1=money invested, P=the production process, M2 is the returned money from the investment, plus a surplus of value, or profit, and the three dots representing an interruption in the exchange process). Here, it is clearly seen that the production process is a means for obtaining more money. Since workers are part of the production process, they too are means for obtaining more money—even if they are organized collectively and act militantly. Being used as a means so that others can obtain more money is not an expression of a just and moral society, where human beings are free agents who control their own social structures and relations. Rather, it expresses a society that treats human beings as things to be used for the benefit of others who obtain more money. It expresses a kind of society where the results of the workers’ own work (expressed as money, as machines and so forth) dominates them rather than vice versa.How can wages in any way compensate for the loss of freedom of workers who work for employers in general? Perhaps the Broadbent Institute can explain it. More likely, though, it will remain silent about the issue.
My argument from another post in relation to unions also applies to the issue of “fair wages”:
There can be no such thing as a fair wage long as there exists a market for workers (in other words, there is no such thing as a fair wage), where human beings are treated as things and as means for purposes over which they have little control. To claim otherwise is to bullshit workers–and workers deserve much better than this.
From the same Broadbent Institute source:
Future research for the long-run sustainability of a grocery industry that exists to deliver necessary services to consumers, food sovereignty, climate crisis mitigation and provide fair-wage jobs to labour should consider nationalized competition dynamics, strategic food stocks, and government administration of food security services.
This idea of “fair-wage jobs to labour” is never explained in the context of the class power of employers. Is the class power of employers to continue to exist? If so, how does the Broadbent Institute justify such a view? It is highly likely that this phrase is just more rhetoric typical of the Canadian left.
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From September 6, 2023 (https://broadbentinstitute.ca/research/common-platform/):
Making the Shift to a Green Economy: The Green Economy Network’s Common Platform
However, by the government’s own admission, it is currently not on-track it meet its emissions targets. Even with the passing of the federal Emissions Reduction Plan in 2022, Canada remains ill-prepared to reach its emission targets by 2030. Moreover, the government has not committed enough resources to create new, good jobs in the wake of inevitable labour market disruptions that will occur if the needed steps to reduce carbon emissions are taken.
From the same date and site:
We can both reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions and create decent paying jobs.
Good-paying jobs? Decent paying-jobs?
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From March 19, 2023 (https://broadbentinstitute.ca/research/canadas-green-industrial-policy-response-2/):
Brendan Haley
With the US introducing an activist climate agenda, “green industrial policy” is becoming a hot topic. The federal government’s Fall Economic Statement declared that Canada needs a “robust industrial policy” focused on net-zero emissions, private investment, and good paying jobs. This should be welcome and amusing to social democrats who have long argued that Canada’s economic and climate policies were too dependent on market-based instruments, compared to more direct sectoral and regional strategies.
The same article uses a similar cliche:
What About Good Jobs and Equality?
Industrial policy has traditionally focused on manufacturing and high-tech sectors. These sectors helped meet multiple societal goals, including provision of good middle-class jobs, technological innovation, as well as competitive exports. However, leading industrial policy thinkers now argue that technology and globalization mean we can no longer solely depend on these traditional sectors to provide the bulk of good, middle-class jobs.
Again from the same article:
We certainly need a green industrial strategy focused on earning export revenues in a net-zero emissions world, but this should not be the sole objective. We need industrial policy to decarbonize all domestic sectors because market-based policies alone are insufficient. Creating good mid-wage jobs in decarbonization services are also important to achieve equality and foster social solidarity.
Finally, from the same article:
Canada needs to develop better administrative capabilities to design and implement green industrial policy that: …
- Enhances equality and supports good, middle-class jobs that will provide the services Canadians need in a net-zero emissions future.
Good, middle-class jobs? What does that mean? As long as you have a middle-level income, then you are middle class and not working class? Such a term–and the view that goes hand-in-hand with it–neglects the fact that those who obtain such money must sell their capacity to work or their own skills at working computers, machines and so forth–as a commodity and become things to be used by dictators called employers. The Broadbent Institute is an ideologist for employers–but it wants to make the class power of employers more humanistic.
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From October 19, 2021 (https://perspectivesjournal.ca/social-justice-min-wage/):
Social justice and the economics of the minimum wage
Our goal should be decent wages for all workers.
Meaning?
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From July 13, 2021 (https://broadbentinstitute.ca/how-the-super-wealthy-get-richer-while-getting-taxed-less/):
How the Super Wealthy Get Richer while Getting Taxed Less
It’s time to create a system that taxes income from investments and profits at the same rate as income, and where everyone pays their fair share. It’s time to tax the rich.
Since taxes arrive by exploiting workers (see for example, the calculation of the degree to which workers are exploited by Air Canada–which produces the profits of private corporations and which includes the income taxes which employers pay (see The Rate of Exploitation of Workers at Air Canada, One of the Largest Private Employers in Canada).
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From February 3, 2020 (https://broadbentinstitute.ca/black-food-insecurity-in-canada/):
Black Food Insecurity in Canada
Melana Roberts
A comprehensive approach that looks at income, decent work and access to economic opportunities will have broader socio-economic outcomes for Black populations, and has been linked to living longer, lowering the risk of diet-related disease, improved mental health, community safety and educational outcomes for Black students.
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From July 20, 2017 (https://perspectivesjournal.ca/support-closing-tax-loopholes/):
Ordinary Canadians should support closing private corporation tax loophole
- From May 6, 2015 ( ):
Top 8 progressive changes coming to Alberta
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From April 15, 2015 (https://perspectivesjournal.ca/15-minimum-wage-fight-canada/) (this is a journal of the Broadbent Institute):
Fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage fight comes to Canada
At least this article defines “fairness”–although it neglects to define what “fair wages” is. However, its definition is extremely inadequate. It lacks any analysis of the nature of how profit is generated and the working conditions of workers.I worked at a brewery for about four years in Calgary, Alberta in the late 1970s and early 1980s (at first it was Carling O’Keefe and then Molson). We had “access to paid sick days, predictable hours and scheduling, and meaningful enforcement of employment laws.” Such conditions hardly converted the work into a form that involved “fair treatment at work.” Both quantiatively (our wages and benefits were less than the value we produced–since the amount of labour time which we expended produced more value than the value we received) and qualitatively (we were mere means for the investors of the brewery to obtain more money, there was no such thing as “fair treatment of workers.”
Does the following express “fair treatment at work?” From Collective Agreement Between Arctic Canadian Diamond Company Ltd. and the Public Service Alliance of Canada (as Represented by its Component, the Union of Northern Workers) Diamond Workers Local X3050, page 2:
Article 4 – Management Rights
4.01 Unless specifically restricted by a provision within this Agreement, the Employer reserves all management rights with respect to operating and managing its business, including but not limited to, the right to establish hiring policies, to select Employees for hire, to determine what work will be performed, what equipment and processes will be employed, how the workforce will be directed and evaluated, whether to increase or curtail operations, to schedule shifts and vacations, to grant leaves of absence, what security measures are required and including the right to make and enforce workplace rules that are not inconsistent with this collective agreement, and generally maintain order, discipline and efficiency.
Since this clause forms part of the collective agreement, does the collective agreement express fair treatment of workers? Does it express the freedom of workers? Does it express a democratic way of life or its opposite? Does it express economic democracy? Economic dictatorship? Economic justice?
Conclusion
The Broadbent Institute engages in many cliches–like union reps and social democrats everywhere. It fails to define what fair wages are or how there can be such a thing as fair wages in the context of the class power of employers. It refers to decent work, good middle-class jobs, good jobs and the like–but it never addresses the class power of employers that dangles over the head of workers on a daily basis at work and, more generally, in their lives at large. It talks of corporations paying their fair share of taxes, but it never investigates where the taxes that corporations pay come from–the exploitation of workers. When it does define what constitutes fairness, its definition expresses at best unionized jobs–but unionized jobs limit the power of employers but do not by any means question such power.
As I suspected, the Broadbent Institute is just one more social-reformist or social-democratic organization that ignores the issue of the class power of employers and their exploitation of the working class.
I was right to assume that the Broadbent Institute was reformist when I talked to the representative of the Broadbent Institute on the phone. It is an organization that fails to represent the class interests of the working class.
The Abolitionary 