The red flag keeps flying

Bill Andersen is still fighting - and winning - industrial battles, but he tells PETER CALDER he might relax a bit more next year.

Spooky fact number one: New Zealand's most celebrated Communist was born on the day - January 21, 1924 - of the death of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

But, unsurprisingly, Bill Andersen doesn't believe in reincarnation. It doesn't sit too well alongside dialectical materialism and he laughs aloud at the idea that the architect of the Russian Revolution might be working in the Onehunga offices of the National Distribution Union.

Spooky fact number two: when he takes a drink he enjoys nothing so much as a vodka.

This resonant detail might have passed unnoticed (we meet, after all, in the morning, well before cocktail hour) but Bill Andersen lets it slip when I ask him what keeps him going.

"Well," he says, with another chuckle, "I don't use any accelerants, except maybe the odd vodka at night."

The aptness of his tipple of choice - that it's indissolubly associated with the frozen homeland of that Lenin bloke - seems entirely to have eluded him. But when I point it out he guffaws.

And as he sets the record straight - his favourite vodka is actually Swedish, not Russian - he's still laughing.

He laughs a lot, actually. Bill Andersen's face has glared, grimly unsmiling, from half a century of newspaper pages documenting disputes and battles with employers and governments alike. But up close he's quick with a joke, usually of the self-deprecating variety, and quick to start laughing at it.

Yet just as quickly, that 77-year-old face drops and the eyes, rheumy and owlish behind large spectacles, gaze back down the years as he considers the question: why, when he might feel entitled to sit in an armchair and rest on his laurels, is he up at 5.30 each day, meeting site delegates to negotiate wage claims or solve workplace disputes?

"I suppose it's a philosophical motivation," he says at last. "I like strategising, working out what can be done to pin back the corporates and their aggressiveness, their lack of regard for lower-paid people.

"I enjoy doing it, and a great number of people in society are going to work doing something they don't particularly like."

It was presumably the philosophical motivation, rather than sheer enjoyment of the work, which drove the president of the National Distribution Union to insist on access to a worksite in late August, even though it led to him being arrested.

Andersen and senior union official Syd Keepa wanted to inspect production lines at a Carter Holt Harvey timber plant in South Auckland to ensure no new staff had been illegally hired to replace the 49 workers who were striking.

They were arrested on trespass charges which were later dropped. Last week the Employment Court condemned the company's behaviour as "indefensible" and fined it $5000 in a decision widely seen as a crucial test of union workplace access rights guaranteed under the year-old Employment Relations Act.

Andersen passes lightly over the dispute - the decision is still subject to appeal - but he admits that his days of leading the union charge may be coming to an end.

He told a weekly meeting of fellow organisers this week that he would be "looking to taper off a bit next year".

"Yeah, I get a bit tired," he admitted when I raised the matter with him later. "My ideology is still bright, I think. But a year or two ago I'd have been up till 11 or 12 at night, writing [for The Red Flag, the paper of the Socialist Party of Aotearoa of which he is president]. Now I tend to finish about 9 or half past."

A workout at the local gym four times a week ensures he keeps excellent health - "except I've got crook knees. I've had one replaced and I've gotta have the other one replaced. They wore out. I tell all my friends it's because I'm on my knees to the bloody employers every other day."

B ILL Andersen's enthusiastic sponsorship of communism is a thread running through New Zealand's industrial history of the past 50 years.

It provided election-platform fodder for Rob Muldoon in his heyday, and ensured that Andersen attracted maximum attention from the Security Intelligence Service.

That attention was not only local. Andersen proudly brandishes a photocopy of a 1957 "foreign service despatch" to the US Department of State which relies on information provided by then Auckland Trades Council President Tom Skinner ("a powerful force in keeping [Communists] under control but he says they are nevertheless troublesome") and describes Andersen as "a tough, vigorous, dedicated communist [who] must be watched continually."

The language, quaintly of its time, suggests a conversation between pest controllers. But in the 21st century, the Berlin Wall dust and relics, the Kremlin crumbled, and the creed discredited, is not communism equally a quaint relic? Does Andersen repent his beliefs?

Fat chance. Muttering darkly that the fall of the Soviet Union was down to "bad leadership and Western interference", he says the presumption that capitalism is working is no less questionable than it was the day he was born.

"The world is in a bad state. Half a billion people a day are going to bed hungry, if they've got a bed. The last time I saw Unicef figures, 38,000 children a day under 5 die because of lack of food.

"I can't see how anyone can argue that the economic and political system we have today is correct. If it is, why all the problems, why all the wars and liberation movements?

"All those people from Roger Douglas to Bill English and Helen Clark are claiming they can reconstruct capitalism and make it work. Well, they're not doing too well."

Despite his lifelong membership of the party - he was a seaman and barely 20 when he joined in Britain in 1944 - Andersen has always seen his duty as being to the wider union movement. Even the watchful Tom Skinner conceded that "you always knew where he was coming from. Bill never stuck a knife in your back."

But Andersen is reluctant to accept the mantle of the movement's elder statesman. "Aw," he says and it's a long drawl, equal parts scepticism and thoughtfulness, "I don't regard myself as a figure of any stature."

It may look like false modesty, but he's happy to claim credit where credit's due - as the man who won sick pay, for example, or holiday pay based on average, rather than base earnings.

This is the age of the entrepreneur. We are all washed clean by the knowledge wave. It's easy to argue old union hands like Andersen are anachronisms or, worse, shackles on progress.

Even he concedes his is "a minority opinion now. We may have lost this period of history. But the forces are assembling."