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experiences as a merchant seaman during World War Two, Locke draws on over forty oral interviews, as well as Bill's unpublished autobiography, to explore what it meant to be a working­class, communist trade unionist through those years.

As a history centred on biography, Comrade tells a riveting story of labour activism and social change. The post-war splintering of the world communist movement fractured New Zealand communists; in the 1970s, the Northern Drivers' Union emerged as a powerful social movement; and Māori land rights and sovereignty activism reframed radicalism through the last decades of the century. The impact of neo-liberalism on trade unions in the late 1980s and 1990s is starkly shown.

The histories of working people, of organised labour, and of left-wing movements are too little told in Aotearoa New Zealand. Writing with insight and empathy, Cybèle Locke has provided a highly readable account of a communist union leader navigating the social and political turmoil of the twentieth century.