He is a onetime college dropout, a former bodyguard, a shrewd political strategist and the face of Rhode Island’s labor movement.

George Nee, the AFL-CIO of Rhode Island’s secretary-treasurer, may be known these days as the silver-haired, back-slapping lobbyist who spends most afternoons patrolling State House hallways. But this union leader has four decades of experience marching and campaigning and sleeping on floors to expand labor’s influence.

He has been versed in the teachings of Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers of America. He has faced shotguns. And he has devoted his life to work, even as many people his age were reveling in the carefree lifestyles of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“The hippies never had the work ethic. You didn’t work for the farm workers if you were a hippie.We were very, very disciplined,” says Nee, a Boston native, reflecting on his early days in the labor movement.

Nee, 58, can’t put his finger on what drew him to the labor unions. His father worked in insurance. His mother was a homemaker.

He met a few farm workers from California at an event at Boston College, where he was a student. And before he knew it, a 21-year-old Nee was moving out of the dorm and into St. Leo’s parish in Dorchester, Mass., where a handful of uneducated farm workers who spoke little English helped coordinate Boston’s grape boycott of the late 1960s. He left college behind.

Nee, who refers to Chavez as “a visionary,” and his fellow organizers were constantly arranging house meetings, talking with clergy and picketing. They met every morning to outline their plans. At night they’d share their progress.

The farm workers sent him to Rhode Island in 1971 to coordinate a lettuce boycott, after the grape boycott succeeded. He slept on an office floor at first, and then in an abandoned building at Brown University. But he says he never went without a meal.

He started meeting the key players in the local labor movement. He led marches. And whenever Chavez would visit the area, Nee served as his driver and bodyguard.

“You were part of the farm workers. If they said put yourself in danger, you do it,” he said. “I’d do it now.”

In the mid-1970s, Nee joined Chavez and eight others on a 40-day pilgrimage across southern California to help organize farm workers. Nee recalls a standoff with growers armed with shotguns.

“They basically said if you try to get in we’re going to shoot you,” he said.

Nee’s rise in Rhode Island labor really began in 1976, when he decided to start an independent union of clerical workers, healthcare workers and jewelry workers. “People would say, ‘What do they have in common?’ I’d say, ‘They’re unorganized.’ ”

The union eventually grew to more than 1,500 workers before it merged with another union, which is known today as the Service Employees International Union, Local 1199.

Nee was hired by the AFL-CIO in 1983, which is when he started lobbying at the State House for organized labor. Twenty-five years later, he’s still there.

He doesn’t face shotguns these days but says he’s faced his fair share of challenges amid falling union membership and shifting political priorities. Nee, who eventually earned a college degree in 1990, says his work is much more political than it used to be.

“We run a much different political program than when I started,” he says. “I always think of the labor movement like the patriots in the American Revolution. We’re a minority of the work force … so in order to survive, you have to have the support of the majority.”

speoples@projo.com