Family: Katrina costs grandmother her job

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) -- When forced to decide between caring for her 18-month-old granddaughter while the child's parents were stranded in New Orleans or showing up for her job, Barbara Roberts chose to be a grandmother.

And for that, she says, she was fired.

Roberts, 54, had driven 200 miles from her home in Mount Vernon to Columbia on August 27, the Saturday before Hurricane Katrina came ashore, to care for granddaughter Trisana for a couple of days. Her daughter, Tina Roberts, and son-in-law, Chris Hardin, were in New Orleans.

It was supposed to be a weekend business trip for the couple, and Roberts, who had used up her allotted time off in her assembly line job at Positronic Industries, had planned to be back to work on Monday. Her daughter had even arranged for another baby sitter to spend Sunday night with Trisana so Roberts could get home in time.

But when her son-in-law tried to schedule the flight home on the afternoon of August 27, he was told all flights had been canceled because of the approaching hurricane.

"There was a Category 5 hurricane with a bull's-eye on our butts, so we called Barb and said we didn't know when we would be coming home," said Hardin, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. "We truly didn't know what would happen down there."

With no other relatives in the area to take care of the child, Roberts said she had no choice but to call work on August 29, the day the hurricane hit, and tell her boss that she would be missing a few days.

"There was no decision to make -- it was already made," Roberts said. "My daughter could have died down there. This was family. You don't walk out on a child -- especially my grandbaby."

Hardin and his wife spent several days locked down in a hotel -- safe from the chaos that befell most of New Orleans after the levees broke -- and finally made it back to Columbia on Thursday, September 1. Shaken up, they asked Roberts to stay one more day.

She says she was told on the phone that she was going to be fired. And on September 6, she was.

"All I know for sure is that I had missed so many hours, and then this came up," Roberts said. "Usually you have a certain amount of vacation time, and I had used it up. You're also allowed so many unpaid days off, and I'd used them up, too. Fact is, I missed the allotted time and I got fired."

In response to questions about Roberts' termination, Positronic Industries President John Gentry said the company had made cash donations to relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina victims, but he declined to talk about Roberts. The company manufactures electrical connectors.

Hardin said his mother-in-law's firing was "absolutely unethical."
"People speak of family values, and I don't see what's a more central family value than a grandmother stepping up in this sort of situation," he said.

"I sit here trying to imagine what kind of world it would be if grandmothers didn't make that decision."

:(

Well this is sad but what would happen if every single person with a family member in need left the job to help them? She could not perform her job maybe she can reapply, it sounds like she had missed alot of work not just a couple of weeks??? Of course we are once again only getting part of the story{the feel sorry for a huricane victim side}. I know I sound harsh but lets face reality there are folks every where that are in need but because they were not shown on the 6:00 news tough sh** for them. Next the country will have to award each family member with a million $ for the loss of a loved one in the huricane.

Yes, maybe the real reason she was fired was because she was a piss-poor employee.
I am also wondering why the parents didn't do more to take care of their own kid. There are many families with infants down there who are somehow muddling through, but maybe they are more resourceful.

No, we are not getting the whole story here but THAT's not unusual.

Some people just want to care for one another, while others only insist that business is everything. What a reputation these companies get when they fire someone for something as stupid as this.

"All I know for sure is that I had missed so many hours, and then this came up," Roberts said.

There's the sentence right there. This wasn't a star employee. My personal experience has been that the employees that miss work/show up late/whatever usually have a pretty good excuse when they finally push too far and get fired. Unfortunately, they get themselves into these positions where they're on their last leg and then shit happens.

That being said, the company should've known what was going to happen with this.

The thing that strikes me is that she said there were no other relatives to take care of the child. Why couldn't she arrange for someone else to babysit the child while she went to work? She could have taken the child to her home temporarily, and arranged for daycare. Since she didn't, I can only assume she felt that missing work was not very important. Her employer reacted to that attitude and fired her.