By the 1970s, New Zealand’s union movement had grown to become powerful, popular, and left-wing. This was in large part thanks to leaders like Bill Anderson, whose organizing skills were matched by his political vision.
Picketers during International Longshoremen’s strike. (Al Fenn / Getty Images)
Review of Comrade: Bill Andersen — A Communist, Working-Class Life by Cybèle Locke (Bridget Williams Books, 2022)
For the first time in a while, socialists in New Zealand’s trade union movement may have reason for optimism. In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, while politicians have been unable or unwilling to help, union campaigns have won significant improvements for growing numbers of working people. As a result, after years of slumping membership, there’s modest but real membership growth.
This is why the release of Comrade: Bill Andersen – A Communist, Working-Class Life by Cybèle Locke is potentially very well timed. Bill Andersen was a prominent communist and the secretary of the National Distribution Union (NDU, now FIRST Union), and his biography is a window into the twentieth-century left of New Zealand’s trade union movement. Most importantly, Comrade demonstrates the indispensable role that organized communists can play in building strong, militant, and political trade unionism.
On the Auckland Waterfront
Andersen grew up in Auckland during the depression of the 1930s before becoming a seafarer. His experience of harsh class oppression as a merchant seaman led him to the communist movement, as did the poverty he witnessed at Middle Eastern ports. Consequently, he returned to New Zealand in 1946 a member of the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ) and found work on the Auckland waterfront.
In 1951, the employers declared a lockout in response to a campaign over safety and wages led by the Waterfront Workers Union. Although Andersen was then a young man, he played a key role on the union’s lockout committee. Although it was illegal at the time, he took responsibility for producing the union’s publications.
The Waterside Workers Union maintained their strike for 151 days before eventually being defeated. Emboldened by their win, the employers deregistered the dockworkers’ union as its members returned to work. Further, the bosses blacklisted around two thousand Auckland waterside workers, forcing them to take their commitment to unionism and solidarity into other trades.
Andersen was among this number. So, in 1951, he found work as a driver and joined the Northern Drivers Union (NDU), an organization that would go on to be linked closely with his name.
As a rank-and-file member, Andersen campaigned to rejuvenate the union alongside other former watersiders and communists. To aid these efforts, the Communist Party established an Auckland drivers branch in early 1953, drawing on the experience and strategy developed by Chip Bailey, a fellow CPNZ member and leader of the Wellington Drivers Union.
This group of rank-and-file communists aimed to build a left wing in the union that extended beyond party members. It took up industrial matters, for example, mobilizing to assist a dispute of bus drivers in 1953 and pushing the union’s leadership to take a firmer stand on drivers’ pay and hours of work. Or, for another example, during negotiations over nationwide minimum conditions for drivers, the CPNZ Aukland drivers’ branch organized a series of stop-work meetings for drivers. This was a step toward militancy that had not been seen before among Auckland’s drivers.
In recognition of his leading role in initiatives like these, Andersen was elected by NDU members as NDU secretary in 1956, allowing him to push ahead with his left-led strategy for rejuvenating the union. The first step the union took under Andersen’s lead was to implement regular delegate conferences and stop-work meetings. Drivers had traditionally been atomized and isolated as a result of their work. But under Andersen, the industry was becoming well organized, militant, and political.
A Steadfast Communist
In the following decades, the NDU waged many battles for its members’ rights, as did the Auckland Trades Council, which Andersen also chaired. In 1968, for example, these two organizations stood at the core of the successful campaign to defeat a 1968 order of the Arbitration Court which attempted to impose a wage freeze across the board. Again in 1980, Andersen was central to the Kinleith Mill strike, which defeated another round of government attempts to keep wages low.
Andersen’s political vision was crucial to this organizing work. Indeed, Andersen remained a steadfast communist his entire life, despite the splits and setbacks that afflicted the movement. He left the CPNZ following the 1960 Sino-Soviet split and helped form the Soviet-aligned Socialist Unity Party (SUP). Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the SUP, Andersen remained a leading member of the left of New Zealand’s trade union movement, continuing to explore avenues for rebuilding socialist organization until his death in 2005.
In addition to providing militants with organization, perspectives, and strategies, the communist wing of New Zealand’s trade union movement fought to ensure that union strength would be brought to bear on issues beyond the workplace. For example, in 1977–78, under Andersen’s lead, the NDU organized in solidarity with Māori people occupying land at Bastion Point to prevent a high-end residential development. The NDU imposed work bans on the site to block construction work going ahead, and when police finally cleared the occupation, Andersen was among those arrested.
The NDU’s commitment to solidarity also saw the union join the campaign against apartheid in South Africa at a time when this was a deeply controversial issue. The union printed literature and organized stop-work meetings to educate members on this issue as well as others.
This was possible because Andersen and his comrades made no separation between the union’s political and industrial work — and history vindicated this orientation. The years in which the NDU and New Zealand’s broader union movement contributed the most to political campaigns were also the high-water mark of industrial strength. Building solidarity with victims of racism, war, and other injustices developed a strong rank and file capable of standing up to defend their own union when called upon. NDU members demonstrated this clearly in 1974 when Andersen was briefly jailed for contempt of court for refusing to lift a NDU ban during a dispute over Auckland ferries. Following a strike of twenty thousand workers, the courts quickly ordered his release.
The Neoliberal Era
While the 1970s was the decade of greatest union strength in New Zealand, by the late 1980s, the tide had begun to recede. In the early 1980s, National Party prime minister Robert Muldoon led a bitter campaign against the unions, attempting to blame them for growing unemployment. A famous National Party advertisement broadcast across the country depicted trade unionists as dancing Cossacks intent on subverting the state. Then, in 1981, New Zealand employers backed these efforts by sponsoring a series of “Kiwis Care” marches in Auckland, bringing thousands to the streets behind anti-communist slogans.
As a consequence, Andersen started to receive death threats. These became all the more ominous when Wellington Trades Hall was bombed in 1984. Although caretaker Ernie Abbott was killed, his murderer was never charged.
After the New Zealand Labour Party came to government in 1984, the unions expected some reprieve. They were, however, blindsided by the party’s sharp turn toward neoliberalism. Labour prime minister David Lange led a sweeping fire sale of state assets while empowering vicious anti-worker managements in those that remained under public ownership. Lange’s government also abolished many import tariffs and subsidies, leading to the collapse of the textiles and automotive manufacturing industries, among others. For working people, the result was dislocation on a huge scale.
When the USSR began to collapse at the end of the decade, it compounded the these setbacks. The Soviet Union had been a personal inspiration to Andersen and others in the SUP, as well as to the broader union left. Disillusionment and disorientation following its collapse dealt a gut punch to a union movement already under attack.
As a consequence of all these developments, the 1980s saw New Zealand’s union movement on the back foot. When the National Party returned to government in 1990, they sensed weakness and went on the offensive. The Employment Contracts Act of 1991 effectively withdrew any legally mandated role for unions, allowing bosses to sidestep them altogether. For most of the twentieth century, unions had been accustomed to a highly regulated industrial wage bargaining system. Now, they found that infrastructure replaced in large part by an employment system based purely on individual contracts. Tragically, the union movement did not lead a fight against these attacks and failed to adjust to the new reality. Within five years, the trade union movement found its membership reduced by half.
Rebuilding From Defeat
Andersen passed away in 2005. He remained president of the NDU to the end as he tried to grapple with the challenges of rebuilding the union movement from its low point in the 1990s. And while his work has yet to be completed, he’s left us with more than a few lessons.
Andersen didn’t join the union movement when it was strong, but during a moment of defeat. The bosses won the 1951 Auckland waterside lockout, leaving Andersen and his comrades isolated, their union deregistered, and the union’s leading activists blacklisted. Had Andersen given up then, Comrade could instead have been a book about a rugby league enthusiast — Andersen was also a leading figure in New Zealand Rugby League, serving as president of the City Newton Dragons until 1981.
But he didn’t give up. Instead, Andersen and his comrades built strong unions from the ground up. Thanks to their work, by the 1970s and ’80s, New Zealand’s union movement was a force capable of repeatedly beating bosses and the government.
This is why Andersen’s most important gift to the workers’ movement is a political lesson. When the Left is strong, it strengthens the union movement — and vice versa. Today, we need organized spaces where comrades can organize, collaborate, and extend solidarity to each other, spaces like those once provided by the CPNZ and the SUP. We need militants who can lead a strike and build a socialist political vision.