In memory and advocacy

In the five years since her husband drowned on the job, Holly Shaw has had plenty of time for tears.

Plenty of time to try to shield the children. Plenty of time to ponder the what-ifs and what-could-have-beens, like what would have happened if her husband had been wearing a life jacket.

Those times, now, are over, though the memory is not.

Because, these days, Holly Shaw wants to make sure no other family experiences what hers did.

That's why yesterday, at the annual Workers' Memorial Day remembrance for those who died on the job, Shaw, a schoolteacher from South Philadelphia, announced the formation of a support and advocacy group created by and for the families of those whose relatives went to work and never came home.

"Our mission is not only to provide support, but also to be strong and vocal advocates for worker safety and reform," she said, speaking to hundreds of labor leaders and family members at the event - a breakfast at the Sheet Metal Workers Local 19 Hall in South Philadelphia, followed by a funeral-like procession on Columbus Boulevard to Penn's Landing.

There, a bagpiper played a mournful "Amazing Grace" as the names of scores of those who had died were read one by one, each death memorialized by a single flower tossed into the Delaware River. The event was sponsored by the labor-funded Philadelphia Area Project on Occupational Safety and Health.

Many of the family members who addressed the group yesterday spoke through tears, but that wasn't Shaw's tone.

Shaw said she and the other women on the stage - Mary Davis, whose husband died in an explosion in 2001, and Luann Wilson, whose construction-worker son fell off a building in 2006 - need to be advocates for worker safety and for tougher penalties for companies that do not create safer working environments.

"We want to be on the political forefront. We want to testify, we want to write editorials. We want to put a face to these names," she said. "A lot of people don't think about safety on the job."

Shaw echoed what a lot of speakers at yesterday's event said - companies found to be in violation of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Act are too often barely penalized by the U.S. Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which enforces the act.

Albert D'Imperio, who heads the Philadelphia OSHA office, attended yesterday's breakfast.

"There is no penalty that would be enough to [compensate] for someone's death," he said, adding that the law limits penalty size.

OSHA often will accept less if it means safety can be improved quickly. "You try to get people to abate the hazard instead of litigating," he said.

More difficult, he said, is monitoring area workplaces.

OSHA has 12 inspectors for 55,000 worksites and five million workers in Philadelphia, Chester and Delaware Counties. Last year, D'Imperio said, his office handled 532 inspections, including 14 involving fatalities.

In OSHA's Marlton office, which covers the 10 counties in southern New Jersey, eight or nine inspectors handle more than 87,000 workplaces, employing 1.2 million.

No one knows what happened to Holly Shaw's husband, Scott, 38, on Sept. 7, 2002. He had been working for Philadelphia-based Armco Co. on a dredging job in the Schuylkill. Armco had rented two barges, and Shaw was on one of them, perhaps moving onto the other, when he fell. A co-worker saw his hat floating in the river.

Marine police found his body a few days later. Shaw sued the barge companies and Armco, which had no insurance, in federal court. The case was settled. Terms are confidential.

OSHA originally fined Armco a total of $4,950 for six serious violations, including failing to require workers to wear life jackets and failing to have proper rescue equipment. The fines later were downgraded to $4,000.

Several calls to Armco were not returned. Lawyers for Armco and the two barge companies had little comment except to say the incident was tragic. Armco has gone out of business, and its former owner, Thomas Clauss, was out of town, his wife said.

"No one knew what happened - but what they did know was that he didn't have a life jacket on," said Mary Elisa Reeves, a Glenside lawyer who represented one of the barge companies. "But that's not the barge owners' responsibility. That's the responsibility of the employer."