Comrade - Bill Anderson: A Communist Working-Class Life

Bridgit Williams Books, Nov 2022, 352 pages.

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 Starting with Bill's experiences as a merchant seaman, Locke draws on over forty oral interviews, as well as Bill's unpublished autobiography, to explore what it meant to be a communist trade unionist through those years.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.