The New Mexico Department of Health profiles former CWA Local 7076 President in their “Know your Coworker” series.
Clad in sweaty rubber suiting and working in the potato and lettuce fields in the SanLuis Valley of Southern Colorado where he was raised, Donald Alire knew he wanted something more for himself and those who worked around him.
His dream of improving himself and helping other workers was not dulled when his high school counselor told him point blank he was “not college bound.”
He decided toprove her wrong,escaping a one-way route down a“dead end job”and eventually earning a bachelor’s degree in science, which led to a quarter century career at theNew Mexico Department of Health.
Now, as a system administrator in the Information Technology Division of the New Mexico Department of Health, he sees every day how his decision to make a better life for himself helps others in the department in turn help New Mexicans.
“Everybody in the state is tied to the Department of Health in one way or another—through a family member or a health issue, through a community member or issue,” he said. “People here know people depend on them, and they take their jobs seriously, they follow it all to a T.”
In many ways he owes his career in the information technology field to a worker who showed up to reboot the server on an electronic potato weighing machine inColorado when Alire was a youth. The guy said he earned $50 an hour. Alire said, “I want to do that.”
He saw much less pleasant things in the fields and on subsequent manual labor jobs– watching a fellow field worker wrestle with seizures that may have been brought on by insecticide spraying of the field; seeing a fellow firefighter in Montana inadvertently cut into his own leg with a saw and being told he had to walk to the nearest town for medical help; witnessing a metal beam fall on a coworker’s foot and crush it in a stitch shop in New Mexico.
Not only did Alire not want to see something like that happen to him; he didn’t want it to happen to his fellow workers. Not surprisingly, not long after he went to work for NMDOH he joined the Communication Workers of America (CWA) union and served as its president for 9 years.
His favorite part of the job was “when I could help somebody out of a bad situation, somebody dealing with physical issues impacting their job,” he said. “Defending them made me feel good.” The responsibility wasn’t always easy as he realized as union president “you can’t make everybody happy.”
He and his wife, Margaret, have 6 children and 6 grandchildren. In his off time he enjoys coaching. In his on-time, he enjoys those who work with him to make NewMexico a healthier state.
“I give credit where credit is due,” he said. “We have nurses, nutritionists, doctors working tirelessly but there are a lot of people who are forgotten – the financial people, office clerks, IT folks. None of us are here for the money. Their efforts show a lot of dedication to the agency. They show they love what they are doing – and with a passion.”
— Robert Nott, NMDOH Communications Director