Scabby the Rat in jeopardy? Fuhgeddaboudit!

Scabby the Rat, the inflated, gnarly pest that unions tote to job actions, is a complex character. Born in Chicago, he for years has turned up at labor disputes around the country, sometimes with sidekicks like the Fat Cat or Greedy Pig.

He has a real fan base and some enemies, like any celebrity. Among the latter is Peter Robb, general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, who has argued that Scabby’s very presence outside a workplace can be “confrontational, threatening and coercive” and therefore should be restricted.

In Chicago, the reaction from unions that have nurtured Scabby is something akin to, “You just try it, pal.”

Nevertheless, the dispute led The New York Times on July 31 to excitedly blare, “Scabby, the Giant Inflatable Union Protest Rat, Faces Extermination.” Last January, Bloomberg Law described Robb’s campaign as “Death to Scabby.”

Stuff like that can ratchet up reactions from even the most stoic trade unionists.

National Labor Relations Board

“This labor board is serious about attacking our First Amendment right to publicize our grievances,” said Mike Lowery, secretary-treasurer of Administrative District Council 1 of the Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Union.

“Threatening? Coercive? Let’s remember, it’s a balloon,” said Edward Maher, communications director for Local 150 of the International Union of Operating Engineers.

Scabby, after all, is the progeny of Chicago unions, although there’s a dispute about the bloodline. Local 150 claims they started him, as do the bricklayers. Lowery said his union has ordered the creatures from Big Sky Balloons and Searchlights in Plainfield since 1990.

Maher one-ups him by digging out a Local 150 newsletter from 1989 reporting on a contest to name their inflated rat, at that time a smaller model that could fit atop a sedan. The article said the winner was one Lou Mahieu, the first of many to suggest naming the rat for “scabs,” or strikebreakers.

Local 150 is among several organized labor groups that has a ownership stake in the Chicago Sun-Times.

International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150

In the last 30 years, Scabby and the menagerie have gone national, with Local 150 often selling their balloons to other unions. He even had a spot on “The Sopranos.” The locals don’t want anybody messing with their favorite way to make a point to passers-by.

There was the time in 2000 when Orland Park police confiscated Local 150’s Scabby. Maher said “more than a thousand” members showed up on short notice in the village parking lot. Scabby was sprung.

So he has powerful friends if he faces off with Robb, who came to the now Republican-dominated labor board after years as a management lawyer in labor disputes. “His clients were often targets of Scabby. He’s hated the rat for years,” Maher said. Union activists recall that Robb, as an NLRB staffer in 1981, was the lead attorney for President Ronald Reagan when he busted the strike of the air traffic controllers.

Through NLRB spokesman Edward Egee, Robb declined an interview. Egee said Robb’s views, expressed in an “advice memorandum” to the board last December in a Chicago case and again last month in a legal brief about a dispute in Philadelphia, amount to an opinion for the board to review. In law lingo, there’s nothing “precedential” in his work.

The opinion also could be rejected by an NLRB administrative law judge, which is what happened in the Philadelphia complaint. Judge Robert Giannasi spurned Robb’s contention that an electricians union shouldn’t have placed inflatable rats outside a Fairfield Inn when it was actually protesting a contractor at the site, not the hotel itself. Giannasi, however, did order the union to stop screaming into a bullhorn, thus disturbing the guests.

The nub of the case against Scabby is that he shouldn’t appear in a union action against a “secondary target,” such as a neutral business that uses a contractor the union is actually fighting.

The Chicago case that drew Robb’s ire involved Local 134 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, prolific users of Scabby and friends. Loop pedestrians have for weeks been treated to the sight of sometimes a multitude of Scabbys outside the 100 block of West Washington, where Local 134 is protesting a contractor using nonunion labor to build a food hall.

The NLRB case, which has not been decided, involved Local 134 employing the Fat Cat balloon depicting a worker gripped in a paw. Robb’s office argued the display outside construction at 620 N. LaSalle was threatening and it wasn’t clear the union was protesting a subcontractor not even at the site.

Local 134 did not reply to a request for comment.

In the end, Scabby has the First Amendment on his side and legal precedent that has defined what’s allowed in picketing or similar union protests, said Andrew MacDonald, a management-side labor lawyer at Fox Rothschild. To some, the balloons are the same thing as leaflets — protected speech so long as they are unaccompanied by threats.

“Scabby is likely alive and well, as least for now,” he wrote in a blog.

In an interview, MacDonald said the NLRB might draft some rules for the rat. “I think there will be some sort of restrictions. Whether they’ll be meaningful or not, time will tell,” he said.

A Republican NLRB tried that before in 2006, but a federal appeals court overturned the ruling for other reasons and sent the matter back to the board. By that time, the NLRB was dominated by President Barack Obama’s appointees, and the board reversed itself, saying the “rat balloon itself was symbolic speech” and not coercive.

Presidents and board majorities change. Scabby has a rodent’s survival instinct.