Healy is best remembered as the longtime head of the International Brotherhood of Stationary Firemen and Oilers (IBSFO), a trade union for steam boiler operators.

[1] As a young man Healy worked as a boiler stoker aboard transatlantic ships, making the crossing 38 times in all.

[2] Healy was prominent in New York City municipal politics and was a close associate of Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, elected to office in 1914.

[3] He was an important figure in the American labor movement, being selected as the AF of L's delegate to the British Trade Union Congress in 1920.

[1] Healy was a staunch adherent of formal diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Russia during the early 1920s, a position which simultaneously brought him into close relations with William Z.