Have another look at the 1970s, historian Cybele Locke suggests. Ignore the flared ties, nylon suits and walk shorts and concentrate on what was going on.
In many ways, it’s where her new book, Comrade, directs the reader’s gaze, fixing on a tumultuous decade and in particular the role played by one man.
The book, just out, is about the late trade unionist Bill Andersen, whose equal-opportunity approach to challenging authority meant he won himself a prominent role in National Party leader Robert Muldoon’s red-baiting brand of divide-and-rule politics during those years.
So well known was the antipathy between them that it became a source of entertainment for some, as Locke records in the book.
"Air New Zealand staff would seat Bill and Muldoon together on the plane when they both travelled to Wellington for meetings and watch the fireworks."
For this and other reasons the ’70s is often categorised as a troubled, strife-ridden decade in which unrest threatened to derail progress — it’s regularly cited as a salutary lesson.
But Cybele’s research has led her to an alternative perspective.
"I am interested in countering this pervasive and successful public relations strategy that was run by those in power — employers, government spokespeople — that painted trade unionists as wreckers of our national economy for daring to demand decent wages," Locke, a senior lecturer in history at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, says.
"I think that public relations strategy was deliberate and it is pervasive, you do hear people talking about the bad old days of the 1970s, when for working class people those were the good old days due to cross-union solidarity, deep connections through community to all kinds of social justice movements."
People won a decent chunk of the pie during those years and a reasonable standard of living, Locke says.
"And it has gone downhill ever since with the deliberate erosion of the trade union movement in this country."
Andersen, full name Gordon Harold Andersen, was born in Auckland in 1924 and grew up in Depression-era New Zealand. By the time the 1970s arrived he was a long-time communist and a prominent leader of the country’s trade union movement. But at least some of the reason he became quite such an influential figure at that time was the breadth of his interests, his "deep connections", stretching across issues from the peace movement, to Māori land rights and the anti-Apartheid movement.
It meant, for example, that by the time Takaparawhau Bastion Point became a focus of protest action in Auckland — in opposition to Muldoon’s plans for the land — the Northern Drivers Union was there supporting Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei.
But it’s Andersen’s union work that he’s principally remembered for.
"He was one of the most significant and controversial trade union leaders of the 20th century," Locke says. "He was involved in a whole series of trade union campaigns that won rights, some of which we absolutely take for granted today."
The eight-hour day, pay rises that met the cost of living, overtime pay that protected workers leisure time, sick leave, redundancy leave, the right to strike, paid parental leave, retirement benefits, these were all issues on which he campaigned and had considerable success, she says.
"Those things will all resonate with people in different kinds of ways but they were won by trade union activity that he was deeply involved in."
Just how successful, and popular for it, Andersen had become by the 1970s is detailed in a chapter of Comrade explaining how he became known as "the man who stopped Auckland".
The Northern Drivers Union had been supporting a Seamen’s Union strike when a court injunction led to Andersen’s arrest and imprisonment in Mt Eden, in July 1974.
Strikes involving 20,000 workers erupted, including a stoppage at the Kinleith mill that historian Bert Roth described as "the greatest display of class solidarity in New Zealand history".
Nearly 10,000 people marched down Auckland’s Queen St to the Supreme Court where Andersen was to appear.
It certainly wasn’t all Andersen’s doing — a man who took a dim view of individualism — but the activism of those years contributed to an increase in union membership to 56% per cent of employees by the early 1980s, Locke writes. In the year to March 1981, the labour share of income rose to 71%, its highest point.
The fact that Andersen was a communist during a period when that was considered by many as beyond the pale, made his successes all the more remarkable, she says.
"He was incredibly controversial because he was a communist in seriously anti-communist times."
Andersen’s communism was a direct result of his time in the merchant navy before and during World War2, Locke says.
"He was very much shaped by being a merchant seaman during the Second World War and suffering from really poor conditions on board ship — rations were inadequate, so being hungry while ships’ officers dined very well. So, he experienced that, then he also was really moved by the poverty he witnessed in ports, in places like Aden, where you have huge amounts of oil being extracted and taken away on ships controlled by British shipping companies, oil companies, while the indigenous peoples were poverty stricken — dock workers on slave wages who he encountered in port."
His efforts to make sense of the world led him to Karl Marx’ explanations of class relations and exploitation.
For Andersen, Marxism became both an explanation and a way to challenge those inequities. He first joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, then on his return following the war, the New Zealand Communist Party.
It has to be remembered, Locke says, that at the time communism was quite popular, the Soviets were World War 2 allies and the Red Army were heroes of the war against fascism.
"When Bill Andersen became a communist it was a very, very different world to the one that emerged in the late 1940s as the Cold War came into being."
Locke says that on the one hand, it took an extraordinary act of courage for Andersen to commit himself to the path he followed, but in other ways it involved choices not so different from the experience of many.
"In some ways I think being radicalised as a young person and wanting to do something about it, being hot headed and charging off to challenge is not all that out of the ordinary."
What set him apart was his capacity to remain utterly committed to his cause, until he died in 2005, she says.
"That’s what makes him extraordinary."
The book
- Comrade, by Cybele Locke, is published by Bridget Williams Books.
