Mike Swisher Oral History Interview
Streaming Media
Description
Mike Swisher began his Labor history as a son of a Business Agent BA of Local #49 of the Sheet Metalworkers Union. At 16, Swisher worked as a clerk at Foodway and joined the Retail Clerks Union. Swisher started with the Insulators Union and worked in Arizona. He hired onto non-Union worksites as a “salt” and organized to unionize the jobsite. Upon returning to Albuquerque, he joined Local #49 of the Sheet Metal Workers’ in 1973 and retired in 2018. He worked on the Carver and Four Square Buildings in Albuquerque as well as the Four Corners Power Plant in Farmington. As the AFL-CIO Community Services Liaison, Swisher ran food drives: sometimes during strikes e.g. the coal miners’ strike in Window Rock and the CWA strike in the early 2000s. Community service has been a hall mark of his Union life. Swisher also describes the building trades’ involvement in housing and real estate which was intended to insure Union work on the job for a long time.
Publication Date
3-15-2018
Keywords
SMART Local #49, Gene Fox of the Insulators’ Union, United Way, cross a picket line, boy and girl scout leader, Silver City strike, Eddie Urioste Carpenters’ Union, NLRB, apprenticeship, health benefits, pension, Letter Carrier Food Drive, Painters and Carpenterrs low income housing, Ludlow Massacre CO, Workers Compensation, Jeep Gilliland
Disciplines
Labor History
Publisher
Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communication, University Libraries, University of New Mexico
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Pinkey, Diane and Mike Swisher. "Mike Swisher Oral History Interview." (2018). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/wphnm/43
Comments
1920x1088; MP4; No institutional restrictions are placed on the use of this collection. Use of material is allowed for educational and research purposes. The University Libraries do not hold copyright.