This past Wednesday, Baton Rouge suffered a power outage that left a large portion of the city, including the University, crippled for a period of two hours. It was an unforeseen event that affected everyone in a unique manner. For Kenyetta Maiden, Facility Services custodian, the outage caused her to tumble down a stairway in the Life Sciences Building while doing her job. Her fall left her with a knee contusion. Maiden took an ambulance to Baton Rouge General Hospital for treatment-but only after she finished discarding the garbage left in her charge. The next day, after receiving pain medication, Maiden returned to work. Her supervisor Dwain Curtis told her that any effort to take a day off to recover would result in either her termination or her forced resignation. Maiden, mother of a 7-year-old daughter and a 5-month-old daughter, chose to resign because if she were fired, she would be unable to work in a civil service position again.
The way Maiden was treated by this University is absolutely disgraceful.
While this board acknowledges that we do not know her exact service record and that it may not have been a good idea for Maiden to show up at work on medication, we believe that her heart was in the right place because she wanted to work through her pain-pain she received while serving this University. This boards thinks it is wrong that a worker on campus could not be cut even the least bit of slack when she was doing her job.
We believe that because Maiden was a custodian, a position of little authority, the University had no problem discarding her as it would yesterday’s garbage, the same garbage she and many other Facility Services workers pick up every day.
The question this board poses to University administrators is, “How can we hope to become a nationally recognized university that has earned the respect of peer universities if we cannot look after our own workers?” We pose this question because it seems to us that the only way to gain the attention of administrators is to put it in terms they care about.
Because they certainly don’t seem to care about those who work for them.
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