Last spring, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union averted a strike by doormen and other residential building workers.

Next year, new negotiations loom for commercial building workers.

A new president will oversee those talks and other challenges to come in the face of economic downturn.

“Manny Pastreich, 32BJ,” the presumptive next leader introduced himself Tuesday, shaking hands with union members on Manhattan’s West Side.

Pastreich is set to take the helm of the 175,000-member union Wednesday when current president Kyle Bragg retires.

“The hardest thing to do in the labor movement right now is organize,” Pastreich said, “to bring the union and all the benefits that our residential members have, our commercial members have, to those workers that are making minimum wage, have really no benefits on their job.”

NY1 spoke exclusively with Pastreich ahead of the board vote to approve him as president.

There are no other candidates and Bragg has endorsed him as successor, calling him a “brother” and “most trusted voice.”

Pastreich is the outgoing union secretary-treasurer, a second-generation labor leader and a Manhattan resident.

He cited recent votes to unionize by Amazon and Starbucks workers as examples of labor’s momentum.

“You see the campaigns that 32BJ has run at airports, there’s been incredible success, incredible interest,” he told NY1.

For the union strong enough in numbers and political clout to help sway elections and usher in development, an ongoing fight involves a legislative agenda to drive down healthcare costs.

“It’s hard for us to win good wage improvements for our members, maintain that high-quality health insurance that they demand and deserve when the prices have gone so high,” Pastreich said.

He noted that jobs like those represented by 32BJ give working-class New Yorkers a path to the middle class.

The future union president chatted with building workers Tuesday who told him about their decades on the job and their pride in their work, one recounting how he took a photo of a resident as a newborn “and today, that person has graduated.”