“People Love the Rat”: How Scabby, Labor’s Mascot, Took New York
By Benjamin Serby
Anyone who has spent time in New York will not be surprised to learn that it is the most rat-infested city in the United States, with an estimated population of two million (roughly one rat for every four people).[1] Strangely, rats are part of the city’s culture — and long have been. As Luc Sante explains in Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, rat-baiting was the city’s “premier betting sport” in the 19th century. Boys were paid to collect rats from the street “at a rate of five to twelve cents a head,” and spectators wagered on how quickly fox terriers or “men wearing heavy boots” could massacre dozens of them at a time.[2]
Such gruesome pastimes are long gone, but the rat remains a source of fascination, even pride, for New Yorkers. Since September 2015, millions have watched Pizza Rat’s heroic struggle to carry a stray slice down the steps of a Manhattan subway station. Though the famous rodent (or its companion, Coffee Rat) might not exactly be cute, it charmed viewers by mirroring the qualities of the stereotypical human New Yorker: ambitious, indefatigable, single-minded, resilient, and just a bit neurotic.
Perhaps New York’s best-known rat, however, is Scabby, the giant inflatable rodent whose presence on the city streets indicates an active labor dispute, usually in the construction industry. New York, in case you haven’t heard, is a union town (at least by American standards), with a union density nearly double the national figure.[3] For years, Scabby has served as the unofficial mascot for organized labor in New York, becoming a familiar, if not always welcome, sight to millions of residents. From his oversized buckteeth to his dark red eyes to his pustular gut, Scabby is completely repulsive, by design. And, at this moment, he is celebrating, having survived a legal challenge that threatened to exterminate him.
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The first Scabby in Illinois in 1989. Image credit: IUOE Local 150.
Like many New Yorkers, Scabby migrated here. His story begins in the Reagan-era Chicago suburbs, where unionized workers in the building trades sought to develop new pressure tactics against nonunion employers. Initially wearing specially-made rat suits (“rat” being a slang term for a nonunion employer), they eventually turned to inflatables as a more comfortable — and attention-grabbing — alternative. The original rat balloon debuted in the late 1980s, and in 1990, members of Local 150 of the International Union of Operating Engineers christened it “Scabby.” The name (referring to a “scab,” or a strikebreaking worker) stuck, and so did the rat. As a growing number of unions borrowed the Scabby kit (complete with a balloon, generator, and “rat patrol” cat and rat suits) from Local 150, the rodent developed a following. Before long, Big Sky Balloons, Scabby’s Plainfield, Illinois-based manufacturer, was receiving requests for customized versions of the rat (larger, smaller, scarier, uglier) from locals around the country.[4]
Scabby arrived in the Big Apple in 1996 at the invitation of Construction and General Building Laborers’ Local 79.[5] A rat about town, he quickly got to work. In Fall 1997, a dissident faction of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association placed Scabby outside the police union’s headquarters to protest leadership’s mismanagement.[6] The following summer, two Scabbies appeared at a mass demonstration against the use of nonunion labor to construct an MTA facility in Manhattan. The inflatable rats, still a novelty to many New Yorkers, were “welcomed with cheers.” As one union official explained to the Daily News, “People love the rat.”[7]
Scabby protesting with members of Construction & General Building Laborers’ Local 79 at a construction site on the West Side of Manhattan in 1998. Image credit: Ángel Franco/The New York Times.
By April 1999, the Times recognized Scabby as “something of a fixture on [New York] streets.”[8] The rat has become more versatile since then, joining unions beyond the building trades and appearing at all kinds of rallies and protests. In 2005, for instance, he helped neighborhood activists in Carroll Gardens publicize a local rat infestation.[9] Over the years, the number of Scabbies in New York has increased to keep pace with demand. While in 2004, the Mason Tenders’ District Council owned all seven of the city’s rat balloons, by 2010 there were an estimated thirty Scabbies in New York City, some as small as six feet high and others as tall as thirty.[10] (On one occasion, the city’s Central Labor Council brought thirteen of them together for a rally in Union Square; according to labor activist and scholar Ed Ott, “People went wild!”)[11] Scabby is also now joined by a menagerie of inflatable labor mascots produced by Big Sky (which is, ironically, a nonunion employer). In addition to the classic rat, unions can purchase cockroaches, pigs, “fat cats,” skunks, and gorillas.[12] The rodent, meanwhile, has become a world traveler, raising morale on picket lines as far away as Australia.[13]
As the rat’s fame has increased, so have its detractors. Many regard the unsightly creature as an egregious aesthetic offense (it’s hard not to argue with them), while others complain that he blocks the sidewalks. In April 1999, police officers in Midtown confiscated a supersized thirty-foot rat belonging to Laborers’ Local 78, claiming that it interfered with traffic. When the city refused to return the balloon, which had cost union leaders upwards of $8,000, the local sued for damages, alleging that Scabby was a “victim of police brutality.”[14]
Scabbies for sale. Image credit: Big Sky Balloons.
Because he is so effective at reaching the public with a pro-union message and putting pressure on his targets, Scabby has gained powerful enemies with deep pockets. For decades, employers have sought to banish him under a provision of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) barring secondary boycotts and “signal picketing” of companies that conduct business with an employer in a labor dispute (as opposed to a direct picket or boycott of the employer). For their part, unions have claimed that appearing with Scabby is an act of symbolic speech designed to attract attention, and thus permitted under the First Amendment. The courts heard cases for years, and in 2011, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — at the time composed mostly of Obama appointees — ruled that displaying Scabby does not constitute unlawful picketing but is in fact a protected form of free speech.[15] (Shortly thereafter, the anti-labor lobbying group Americans for Job Security stationed a rat of their own outside the NLRB offices.)[16]
Enter Peter Robb, NLRB general counsel under President Trump. In December 2018, Robb — a management-side attorney who allegedly “hates the rat” — revived a previously dismissed complaint brought by an Illinois construction company, effectively moving to overturn the 2011 Board decision. Robb claimed that displaying the inflatable rat constituted unlawfully coercive speech that violates the NLRA and is not covered by the First Amendment.[17] With the case on the docket, labor advocates feared that the majority-Republican NLRB would finally seal Scabby’s fate, while some legal experts warned that the impending ruling foretold an assault on various forms of protest, thus threatening not just labor rights but general civil liberties.[18]
These anxious speculations were laid to rest following the 2020 presidential election. Right after taking office, President Biden unceremoniously fired Robb, cheering Scabby’s supporters.[19] More recently, in July, the NLRB ruled 3-1 to dismiss the case. The Board decision was a victory for Scabby and his allies in the labor movement, although a modest one when weighed against recent major court rulings recognizing both the campaign contributions of corporations and wealthy donors (in Citizens United v. FEC) and the avoidance of union dues by public sector workers (in Janus v. AFSCME) as forms of protected “speech.” For now, at the very least, Americans can rejoice that they do not live in a country where burning a cross is legal but appearing with a giant inflatable rat is not.
Still, the secondary boycott provision of the NLRA, under which he has been challenged in the past and almost certainly will be challenged in the future, remains in place. Among the key measures proposed by the Biden administration, currently imperiled by right-wing Democrats in both houses of Congress, is the PRO Act, which would do away with the more than six-decade-old law once and for all. As the fight to roll back the assault on labor rights continues, not just in New York but across the country, you can expect to see more of Scabby, cheering workers and getting under the skin of their employers. Like his smaller relatives, who continue to thrive despite a centuries-long eradication campaign, Scabby is a survivor.
Benjamin Serby is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Honors College at Adelphi University. He is an intellectual historian of the 20th century United States and a former shop steward in CPW-UAW Local 4100.
[1] Polly Mosendz, “New York Doesn’t Have More Rats Than People After All,” Newsweek, Nov. 6, 2014.
[2] Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2004), 107.
[3] Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce, “The State of the Unions 2020: A Profile of Organized Labor in New York City, New York State, and the United States,” The CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, September 2020.
[4] See: Sarah Jaffe, “The History of Scabby the Rat,” Vice, March 7, 2013; Max Green, “How a Rat Balloon From Suburban Chicago Became A Union Mascot,” WBEZ Chicago, April 19, 2017; Robert Channick, “Born in Chicago, Scabby the Giant Inflatable Protest Rat May Be Banned from Picket Lines by National Labor Board,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 8, 2019; and Amanda Aronczyk and Jacob Goldstein, “How the Rat Blew Up,” Planet Money, Dec. 4, 2020.
[5] Benjamin Weiser, “Police Corner a Big Rat, and Union Makes a Federal Case,” New York Times, April 22, 1999.
[6] Paul Schwartzman, “Failures Fuel PBA Dissent: Union Boss Described as ‘Serial Bungler,’” New York Daily News, March 1, 1998.
[7] Michael Daly, “Making of A Rally, Rat & All,” New York Daily News, July 1, 1998.
[8] Wiser, “Police Corner a Big Rat.”
[9] Timothy Williams, “Plant No Flowers: In Overrun Brooklyn Park, Neighbors Stage a Rat Festival Instead,” New York Times, Oct. 16, 2005.
[10] Michael Pollak, “F.Y.I.: The Meaning of Rats,” New York Times, March 7, 2004; Larry McShane, “Rat Has Been a Love of Labor for 20 Years,” New York Daily News, Nov. 21, 2010.
[11] McShane, “Rat Has Been a Love of Labor for 20 Years.”
[12] Green, “How a Rat Balloon From Suburban Chicago Became A Union Mascot”; Aronczyk and Goldstein, “How the Rat Blew Up.”
[13] Matthew Stevens, “Scabby the Rat Heads to the Mines,” The Australian Financial Review, Oct. 10, 2016.
[14] Wiser, “Police Corner a Big Rat”; Greg B. Smith, “Union Hits Rat Patrol: Local Sues to Recover Rubber Rodent,” New York Daily News, April 22, 1999.
[15] Jaffe, “The History of Scabby the Rat”; “NLRB Rules Inflatable Rats May No Longer Constitute Signal Pickets,” National Law Review, June 26, 2011.
[16] Mike Elk, “Pro-Business Rat Attends NLRB Hearing on Proposed Union Election Rule,” In These Times, July 20, 2011.
[17] Hassan A. Kanu, “Death to Scabby: Trump Labor Counsel Wants Protest Icon Deflated,” Bloomberg Law, Jan. 22, 2019.
[18] “Scabby the Rat,” In the Struggle! Podcast, March 3, 2019; Kevin Eitzmann, “Scabby the Rat vs. the NLRB,” New York State AFL-CIO Union Strong Podcast, Oct. 2, 2019; Aronczyk and Goldstein, “How the Rat Blew Up.”
[19] Noam Schreiber, “The Biden Administration Fired a Trump Labor Appointee,” New York Times, Jan. 20, 2021.