Hector Figueroa, Union Leader With Impact, Dies at 57

https://portside.org/2019-07-18/hector-figueroa-union-leader-impact-dies-57

Portside Date: July 18, 2019

Author: Patrick McGeehan

Date of source: July 12, 2019

The New York Times

Hector Figueroa, president of the Service Employees International Union 32BJ, marched with workers seeking a fair contract in New York City in 2014. He increased the union’s political clout in his seven years as its leader.

Hector Figueroa, who as president of one of the country’s most influential labor unions led successful campaigns for better pay and working conditions for thousands of low-wage workers, died on Thursday at his home in Jackson Heights, Queens. He was 57.

His wife, Deidre McFadyen, said the cause was a heart attack.

Mr. Figueroa was president of 32BJ SEIU, a New York local of the Service Employees International Union that represents more than 170,000 building cleaners, security guards, doormen and airport workers. In the seven years since he was first elected to lead the local, it added about 50,000 members and built its political clout.

Mr. Figueroa supported the grass-roots effort by fast-food workers in New York that grew into a nationwide campaign for a higher minimum wage known as the Fight for 15.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Mr. Figueroa said the union’s message to fast-food chains was that “the industry as a whole is not meeting the needs of its workers by fundamentally basing their model on the poverty of working people.”

With the demeanor of a college professor, he guided airport workers both in brief picket lines and in drawn-out protest campaigns, flexing the union’s muscles in public while he worked privately to coax concessions from elected officials and their appointees.

Last year those efforts yielded a resolution from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to raise the minimum wage to $19 an hour for about 40,000 workers at the three main airports serving New York City.

“Hector was incredibly adept at working with and engaging with elected officials,” said Larry Engelstein, a former executive vice president of the union. “But he would never, ever be intimidated or fearful of the consequences that might follow from taking a principled stand.”

Mr. Engelstein cited Mr. Figueroa’s controversial stance on Amazon’s scuttled plan to create a second corporate headquarters in Queens. While other labor leaders opposed the idea of providing tax breaks to a giant company that had resisted unionization, Mr. Figueroa wanted a chance to get Amazon on 32BJ’s “home field,” as he put it, where he could start organizing its workers.

“If there is any place where it would be possible to leverage the labor movement’s existing power to crack open the door to collective bargaining for Amazon workers, it is here,” Mr. Figueroa wrote in a February op-ed article in The Daily News after Amazon’s decision to pull out.

Hector Jose Figueroa was born on April 3, 1962, in Ponce, Puerto Rico. His parents, Luis and Castita, were both educators: His father was a school principal, his mother a teacher and principal.

After high school, Mr. Figueroa attended the University of Puerto Rico, but he left when student protests over tuition increases roiled the campus, said Ricardo Mosquera, a friend and former schoolmate.

Mr. Figueroa moved to New York, where he lived with an aunt in the Bronx and enrolled at New York University. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics there, he went on to study economics at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.

He spent the rest of his life in the labor movement, initially as a researcher with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in New York. He then joined the service workers union in Washington before going back to Puerto Rico to manage a successful campaign to organize public employees there.

Mr. Figueroa returned to New York as the secretary-treasurer of 32BJ in 2000. He was elected president in 2012 and re-elected last year.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his father; a brother, Luis; a sister, Vilma Figueroa Martinez; a daughter, Elena Figueroa; and a son, Eric, from his marriage to Maria Figueroa, which ended in divorce.

Mr. Engelstein recalled that as earnestly determined as Mr. Figueroa was, he also had an “impish” side that shone during staff meetings. His hands were always busy, he said, either playing with science-fiction action figures, posting opinions to his Twitter feed or sketching his colleagues.

“His notepads at our meetings often contained wonderful caricatures of everyone sitting around the room,” Mr. Engelstein said.