Scabby was born in 1990 in Illinois, from the minds of organizers Ken Lambert and Don Newton from District Council 1 of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers. According to council director James Allen, the organizers got together and suggested a “bigger than life” symbol for picket lines that would get people's attention and immediately send a signal to the businesses being picketed.
Peggy O'Connor, co-owner with her husband Mike, of Big Sky Balloons and Searchlights, Inc. in Plainfield, Illinois, remembered when the call came in for the rat. “Mike and the organizers were going back and forth, saying, 'We need it more snarly.' They wanted a mean, ghastly looking kind of rat.” With some claws and the now-famous “scabby” pink belly, the rat was complete, and the basic shape hasn't changed since then.
Scabby struck a chord with workers—Allen noted that the rat was already a symbol for bosses who didn't use union labor or do right by their workers. “I think [Scabby] was, in fact, created through the collective consciousness brought about by decades of struggle,” commented Miles Kampf-Lassin, community editor at In These Times.
From the first appearance, it took less than a year for other locals to want their own Scabbys. “The novelty spread like rats,” O'Connor joked. Big Sky sells about 100 rats a year, ranging from six feet to 30 feet tall, though their best sellers are 10, 12, and 15-footers. “We've sold the most to the East Coast, we've sold them also to California, sold them to New Mexico, sold them to places in Canada,” O'Connor said. “We'll drive around to a snow-removal company and they've got a rat that we sold to somebody in New Jersey, and it's like, 'Wow, the rat came back.' The different unions borrow them from one another, people will call us and say, 'One of your rats is at the snow removal place.' They just pop up.”
They come in multiple colors—a bright yellow Scabby joined Chicago's teachers on their strike this year—and customizations like longer or shorter claws, different facial expressions (some, O'Connor noted, want their Scabby less snarly) are available. Big Sky also sells “fat cats,” complete with diamond pinky ring and a construction worker held by the throat, in six sizes, and “greedy pigs” in four. There's even a “union bug” for the ultimate gross-out factor.
But Scabby remains the most popular, the most recognizable. In an email interview (he—or she--prefers to remain anonymous), the person behind the “Scabby the Rat” Twitter handle commented, “The symbol of Scabby appearing at a strike is a clear signal to the public that the management is attacking its workforce and the public by using unfair and unsafe practices. Such signals are not often clearly received by the public, in part because labor relations is not a simple topic. A 12-foot inflatable rat helps to make the message much clearer.”