President of influential service-workers union in N.Y.

NEW YORK — 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 Thursday at his home in Queens. He was 57.

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

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

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, 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.”

He guided airport workers in picket lines and protest campaigns, flexing the union’s muscles in public while he worked privately to coax concessions from elected officials and their appointees.

“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.”

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

Figueroa was born April 3, 1962, in Ponce, Puerto Rico.

He moved to New York, where he enrolled at New York University. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics, 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.