The Washington Post, October 2, 2010, Saturday

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The Washington Post

October 2, 2010, Saturday

Raising a big stink? Try the rat.

The rat is down.

It's the motor, Doug Webber thinks. Something is wrong with the rat's motor. When the rat is up, it is 13 feet tall, it has glowing red eyes, it has black claws, it has yellow teeth, it has a pustulated sore in the middle of its belly that meas-ures about one foot by two feet.

But now the rat is down, a pile of collapsed gray vinyl across from the Daycon headquarters in Upper Marlboro.

"We've had him since April," says Webber, the business representative for Teamsters Union Local 639and the organizer of this Daycon picket. "But sometimes the Metro Council will call up and say, 'We need the rat back,' and then we'll give it up for a while."

A few weeks ago Webber got a call from the Metro Council, Washington's local AFL-CIO branch, which owns the rat; the Montgomery County Government Employees Organization was organizing a protest and needed an inflatable rodent. MCGEO members borrowed it, they returned it, it was broken.

The motor, which inflates the rat, is in a zippered panel on the rat's butt. Webber, a portly man with gray hair and a goatee, reaches into the panel and removes a few parts so that he can run to Home Depot for replacements. He looks down, nudges the deflated rat gently with his shoe, and says:

"Poor Scabby."

A labor union in Washington will on occasion be upset with somebody. Contract negotiations go awry. Nonunion workers get hired. At these moments, you need a symbol. You need something that is going to attract the attention of passersby, something that your members can rally around during their protest, something that is so hideous that the company whose building it sits in front of will do just about anything to get you to move it.

You need access to a rat.

"Are you doing a rat story?" Frank Larkin says with delight. Larkin is a spokesman for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Washington. He has worked with a number of rats in protests around the country. "It's sort of like Lassie," Larkin says. "There are a number of rats, but the public thinks there is only one."

"It's a widespread symbol," says Jeff Grabelsky, a professor at Cornell's institute on labor relations, who studies unions. In urban areas, the inflatable rat has achieved a level of ubiquity, becoming one of the most recognizable protest strategies. There are Flickr pages dedicated to following them: "The Rat Patrol" has hundreds of photos submitted by rat paparazzi.

"We get our rat from New York," says Linda Bridges, a vice president with the local Office of Professional Employees International Union. Her union has its own bullhorns and loudspeakers. But the rats? "They're pretty expensive, so we just borrow them."

"We have access to three," boasts John Boardman. Boardman is the local executive secretary-treasurer of Unite Here, which represents workers in the hospitality industries and nationally has about a quarter-million members. He doesn't always use the rats - better to reserve them for important occasions - but everyone knows he has them.

Boardman's rats belong to his group's sister branch in New York, but he can get those big boys to Washington any-time he wants, with just a phone call.

"The rat circuit is pretty identified," Boardman says. His and Bridges's might come from New York, but "if I made a couple of calls, I could probably locate a rat in the District, just from the folks I know."

In Washington, the Metro Council's Scabby has an agent. All of his booking is handled by Chris Garlock, union coordinator and chief rat wrangler. His group inherited it from a union that wasn't using it anymore. "Someone will call me and ask me, 'How do I get the rat?' " Garlock says. His answer: It's complicated.

There are all sorts of rules about the rat, and about Washington protests in general. Is the rat going to be sitting on a lawn or strapped on top of someone's car? Is the rat going to block traffic, either foot or vehicular? "The rat - well, you've seen it," Garlock says. "It's got a bit of a big footprint."

There have been debates over the legality of the rat. In 2003, for example, a hospital filed charges against a union of sheet-metal workers in Florida, claiming that the giant inflatable rat that the workers had been using to protest was an unfair labor practice. The Cardozo Law Review ran an article: "Is a Giant Inflatable Rat an Unlawful Secondary Picket?"

(The National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that oversees issues of employees' rights, declined to offer an opinion on rats for this article, citing a rat-related court case on the NLRB's docket for review.)

"It's not like you're coming over and borrowing a cup of sugar," Garlock says. The rat comes with responsibilities. Sometimes Garlock will steer people away from the rat, if he thinks they haven't fully considered the implications. He'll talk through some options to start with. "How about going to the boss's country club" to picket? "Or how about picket-ing in front of his church? You have a whole bunch of options, and you always want to escalate."

Sometimes, as with nuclear weapons, the threat of the rat is enough.

"But if you start with the rat . . . " Garlock says, trailing off.

If you start with the rat, there is nowhere to go but down.

The history of rats (the furry kind, not the inflatable kind) in inextricably entwined with the history of humans. They don't live somewhere unless we do, says Robert Sullivan, author of "Rats: Observations on the History and Habi-tat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants." In one of the Revolutionary War's first battles, the New Yorkers who participated were known as "vermin," thus kicking off centuries of American rodent-based insults. "They're vermin and lice, crummy faceless hoards of disgusting creatures," Sullivan says. What better symbol to immediately evoke revulsion?

The rats (the inflatable kind, not the furry kind) have been used in protest for at least 20 years. This is when Big Sky Balloons, a company in Plainfield, Ill., that specializes in giant inflatables, created its first rat - made-to-order for a bricklayers union in Chicago. Mostly the company does clowns or Santas for school fairs or holiday parties, but a subset of the business is "union balloons," which, in addition to three varieties of giant union rats, also include union skunks, corporate fat cats, greedy pigs and cockroaches.

"The cockroach, we've only sold two," says Peggy O'Connor, who runs Big Sky with her husband, Mike. "Scabby the rat, he's the classic. Usually people just want the standard model. Sometimes they might want the rat to wear a top hat or, like, hold a union worker in [the rat's] hand." The rats run from around $2,300 for the smallest size, a six-footer, to $8,100 for a 20-footer. Big Sky sells 60 to 75 a year, mostly to cities on the East Coast. They're used most often by construction and carpenters unions.

Note: Big Sky, the maker of union rats, does not have a unionized workforce.

Not everyone uses the rat. "It's not something we've really embraced," says Christopher Nulty, a spokesman for the Service Employees International Union, which represents nearly 2 million workers in about 100 occupations. Nothing personal, he says. They're just overflowing with protest props already.

Certain restaurant or food service unions don't use the rat, either. The symbolism gets too confusing. Usually Scabby is used to symbolize scab workers; if you put him in front of a supermarket, everyone just assumes the building has a rodent problem, missing the message entirely.

And then there's the question of whether the rats are even effective - something for which there are no hard data. Local targets of the rats say they're not.

"Really, we haven't paid too much attention to it," says Laura Howe of the Red Cross, which has previously been a rat target. "From time to time we have people that protest . . . and sometimes the rat shows up. It's another day in Washington."

Back in Upper Marlboro, Doug Webber has returned with the repaired motor, which he pops back into Scabby, whobegins to whir. The rat is plugged into the generator, which Webber lugs around in the back of his van along with the rodent, which fits neatly into a large cardboard box when not inflated and is usually stored in a closet.

Within minutes, the rat begins to rise - his body filling with air, then his paws, and finally his long, skinny tail.

Across the street, the Teamsters picketers stop their marching to watch Scabby sway in the breeze.

"Beautiful," one says. "Beautiful."

The trucks that drive by will often honk in appreciation. Lots of union laborers out here in this corporate park. Occasionally a Daycon employee will pull into the parking lot and look witheringly at the rat; when the company's media relations department is asked for comment on how it feels about the rat, a representative says that she'll look into it. She never calls back.

The rat needs to be tethered with tent stakes and nylon rope. If it's not properly secured, it could tip over in an unseemly manner, or roll into traffic, or even bounce down the road - a rat race of one, dragging its tail behind it.

"That's the message we want to send," Garlock says later on the phone. "Once you unleash the rat, there's no telling what could happen."
hessem@washpost.com

LOAD-DATE: October 2, 2010