PAGE 2 | February 15, 2019 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
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NATIONAL
Trump appointee wants
to ban Scabby the Rat
Standing 25 feet tall, with scary red
eyes and yellow fangs, Scabby the
Rat is a union hero and an eye-catch-
ing sign of a labor dispute — typi-
cally where non-union “rat” contrac-
tors are at work. But the
Trump-appointed top lawyer at the
National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB) hates Scabby, and is trying
to ban the inflatable beast, according
to a Jan. 22 article in Bloomberg.
The NLRB is an independent fed-
eral agency that administers the fed-
eral law governing most private sec-
tor unions. It consists of two parts: a
quasi-judicial five-member board
that interprets the law and decides
cases, and a network of field offices
that runs union certification elections
and prosecutes labor law violations,
headed by an independent general
counsel.
Since December 2017, the general
counsel has been Trump appointee
Peter Robb, a management-side la-
bor lawyer who for years repre-
sented National Elevator Bargaining
Association in its dealings with the
International Union of Electrical
Constructors.
Robb has been looking since last
April for a case to attack Scabby
with, according to an unnamed
NLRB source cited by Bloomberg
— and in December he found one.
The case centers around Donegal
Services, a non-union dump truck
company targeted by Operating En-
gineers Local 150. Local 150 put
Scabby up at multiple Donegal job
sites along with sign saying “Shame
on” the project owner “for harboring
rat contractors." Donegal filed an un-
fair labor practice charge against the
union saying the rat “threatened, co-
erced, or restrained,” Donegal’s cus-
tomers, and therefore violated the
law’s ban on “secondary boycotts”
and “recognitional picketing.”
Based on past precedent, local
NLRB agents dismissed the charge,
but Robb ordered them to revive the
complaint and seek an injunction.
The case is pending. Most labor
lawyers think Scabby will win: The
rat has faced multiple court chal-
lenges over the years, but always
won, thanks to the First Amendment
protection of symbolic speech.
According to labor journalist Sarah Jaffe, Scabby was con-
ceived in 1990 by Ken Lambert and Don Newton, organizers
with Illinois-based Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Dis-
trict Council 1. They worked with union-represented Big Sky
Balloons of Plainfield, Illinois, to design the rat, and it was
an immediate hit. Big Sky has made hundreds of rats since
then, and added cigar-smoking fat cats and greedy pigs to
its line-up.
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