Comrade Bill Andersen: A Communist, Working Class

Description

Author: Cybele Locke
Format: Paperback
Publication date: 07/11/2022
Imprint: Bridget Williams Books
ISBN: 9781988587899

‘I am not interested in ambition in the bourgeois sense. The only ambition I have is to make sure I’m working for a progressive policy. Communism means that much to me. And, yes, I would certainly like to see New Zealand a Communist country.’
– Bill Andersen

Bill Andersen was one of the most significant figures of the twentieth-century trade union movement in New Zealand. In this biography, Cybèle Locke reveals the relationship between communism and working-class trade unionism during the Second World War and the following decades. Starting with Bill’s experiences as a merchant seaman, Locke draws on over forty oral interviews, as well as Bill’s unpublished autobiography, to explore what it meant to be a communist trade unionist through those years.

Comrade tells an absorbing story of labour activism and social change, from the post-war splintering of the world communist movement, which divided New Zealand communists; to the Northern Drivers’ Union’s emergence as a powerful social movement; and on to the stark impacts of neoliberalism on trade unions in the late 1980s and 1990s. Writing with insight and empathy, Cybèle Locke provides a highly readable account of a communist union leader navigating the social and political turmoil of the twentieth century.