Lee Saunders is a hugger.
The president of the 1.6-million-strong American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Mr. Saunders was in his element on Wednesday, even if he happened to be inside a sterile, overly large, overly air-conditioned hotel ballroom in Chicago’s South Loop.
Before the public-sector union’s faithful, on the outskirts of the Democratic National Convention, Mr. Saunders greeted Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s young mayor and a former teachers’ union activist, as “a good friend, one of us” and sent him off with a hug.
Next came Representative Mark Pocan, a progressive from Wisconsin, where Republican leaders have decimated public-sector unions. “We’re going to get our union back in Wisconsin,” Mr. Saunders promised, before giving Mr. Pocan a hug.
Finally came Marcia Fudge, the former mayor of a suburb of Mr. Saunders’s hometown, Cleveland, a former congresswoman from the city and a former secretary of housing and urban development. Mr. Saunders hailed her as a “sister” in the labor movement whom he had known practically his whole life. She got a very big hug.
Union presidents have been treated well by the Democrats at a convention celebrating the party’s new ticket.
Mr. Saunders, who has led his union since 2012 and was just re-elected president last week for another four years, was one of six labor presidents who shared the stage on the first night of prime-time programming. Shawn Fain, the president of the United Automobile Workers, earned a whole separate address.
Mr. Saunders also leads the umbrella A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s political committee.
Of the nearly 4,700 Democratic delegates at the United Center, more than 100 come from AFSCME, and hundreds more are members of other unions, a built-in cheering section every time a union chief gets the microphone or a speaker mentions organized labor.
But Mr. Saunders has particular reasons for working the convention hard, hugging as many politicians as possible, hosting a party at the Art Institute and holding a series of Democratic breakfasts to lure in allies and win friends.
For many Democrats, the notorious “Project 2025” — the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second term for former President Donald J. Trump — is a boogeyman mentioned over and over in dire political warnings and fund-raising appeals. But to the unions that represent government workers, from the federal “swamp” in Washington to the smallest municipalities, it is truly an existential threat.
The blueprint proposes to ban public-sector unions; give companies the right to break union contracts midstream; end project-labor agreements that set work rules for managers and union workers at government construction sites before earth is moved; repeal so-called prevailing wage laws that mandate salaries on government projects to be commensurate with union wages; and give states the right to override the federal minimum wage.
“We’re under attack like never before,” Mr. Saunders said in an interview on Wednesday, “and those attacks are not going to end until we, you know, we win.”
In exchange for the glad-handing on the convention’s outskirts and in its corridors, the politicians get the AFSCME muscle, which reaches into state, county and local governments, from officials in state agencies to street cleaners and school bus drivers in the smallest of towns.
It is Mr. Saunders’s job to make sure those union workers are educated about their choices in November, and then to put them to work. He swears he does not tell them how to vote, but the message has gotten through.
“They’re ready to rumble, man,” he said. “They’re ready to go.”
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