A look at Scabby’s past reveals his inflated family history

The big guy known as Scabby the Rat loomed over Sixth Avenue one chilly day in November. People snickered at the veil atop his massive head. Scabby didn’t flinch. He had dressed for the occasion: a wedding at Downtown’s swanky Duquesne Club.

Of course, Scabby wasn’t invited to the nuptials. He’d never make it through the club’s front door. He literally wouldn’t fit. So his handlers stationed Scabby on a sidewalk across the street to protest the wealthy groom’s mistreatment of workers.

Someone snapped a picture of Scabby that day. A few months later that photo made its way into a full-page ad in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette insinuating Scabby is bad news for his beloved city. He’ll scare off investment and “new technology companies,” read the ad, cleverly designed to exude the aesthetics of a 1950s milk carton.

Such a scurrilous charge would have punctured the spirit of a lesser rat, but Scabby is made of tougher stuff — vinyl-coated nylon. He has, in fact, embraced the ad. It has made him the most famous balloon in Pittsburgh since that giant (and freaky) inflatable rubber duck appeared on the Allegheny River a decade ago. 

Now the dominant visual symbol of a five-month strike pitting more than 100 unionized workers against the Post-Gazette newspaper, Scabby is constantly rising to the occasion, thanks to a gas-powered generator and an air pump. 

Fully inflated, he’s a massive presence — a 10-foot snarling rodent sitting on a 6-foot-tall wedge of yellow cheese. He strikes a fearsome pose, with his white-gloved paws balled into fists. Yet there’s something endearing about him. Perhaps it’s his protruding belly, covered only partially with a red red tank top emblazoned with the words  “This rat’s not for you.” He could be someone’s cranky dad.

Scabby is the progeny of a special breed of rodent found on picket lines throughout the country, yet he bares little resemblance to his kin. There’s no mold or template for the Pittsburgh Scabby. He’s one of a kind.

The Scabby family story begins in a Chicago suburb in ancient times, before HTML and boy bands. In 1989, at the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150, newly hired organizer Jim Sweeney searched ways to amplify his union’s protests at worksites employing nonunion labor. He started by drawing cartoon rats on protest signs. It worked. People noticed.

Seizing on that success, Sweeney asked a stagehand union member who created costumes to make a rat suit. Soon, man-sized rats stalked the sidewalks at Local 150 protest sites. This proved an effective form of street theater, but a problem soon developed. After several uses in the summer heat, the heavy rat suits reeked. Cleaning them proved very difficult.

Sweeney wasn’t about to let a little stink stop him. While driving to the union hall one Saturday morning, he passed a Ford dealership using a giant inflatable gorilla to attract customers. A bolt of inspiration struck Sweeney. He quickly commissioned the production of an inflatable rat.

Primordial Scabby emerged as a diminutive chubby fellow about 5 feet tall. He snarled, baring sharp teeth, and menacingly extended his claws. Members of Local 150 strapped him to the roof of a yellow automobile. The Rat Patrol was born. 

At first, the airy rodent prowled nonunion works sites in anonymity. That changed in November 1990, when Local 150 launched a contest to name the balloon rat. Several union members suggested the moniker “Scabby” — a play on the word “scab,” used to describe strikebreakers. His ride was renamed “Scab Tracker.”

Scabby has evolved over the years. He’s grown — variations now range from 6 to 30 feet in height. But his basic look remains. He has become more horrifyingly disgusting, with red eyes and a pizza-sized bloody sore on his stomach. Blech!

Local 150 now utilizes about 15 Scabby balloons over a wide geographical area. The local represents 23,000 members, most in construction industries, and regularly finds itself involved in labor disputes, so the team of inflatable rats sees a lot of action.

“Scabby can be fairly effective,” said Dale Pierson, a Local 150 attorney who’s been involved with Scabby from the beginning. “People don’t like to be embarrassed. Management and the people Scabby is trying to ridicule hate him. He gets under their skin. But kids love him. It’s a neat phenomena.”

Scabby’s a big hit at the Local 150 summer picnic, he said. Everyone wants a selfie with the big bad rodent. 

Of course, fame comes at a cost. Scabby’s been shot with arrows and stabbed with a kitchen knife. Last summer an enraged man drove his vehicle onto a curb and plowed into Scabby. Each time, Pierson identified the attackers, who were compelled to pay for damages. Scabby balloons can cost as much as $5,000. Retired union members now act as Scabby bodyguards.

Most notable of Scabby’s enemies has been Peter Robb, President Donald Trump’s appointed head counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. Robb has a long history of stomping on unions. He helped President Ronald Reagan bust the Professional Air Traffic Control Organization’s strike in 1981, setting the stage for a decadeslong all-out assault on labor. He then spent years undermining workers’ ability to organize and bargain.

Scabby truly got under Robb’s skin, so much so that Robb tried to get Scabby outlawed at picket lines and strikes. He failed. When President Joe Biden took office, he quickly proved his pro-Scabby bona fides by firing Robb, thus ending the federal government’s Trump-era prosecution of a balloon.

Pittsburgh Scabby entered the arena in the late 1990s, said Gary Breidegam, director of marketing for International Union of Operating Engineers Local 66, based in Pittsburgh. Like their colleagues in the Chicago area, members of Local 66 yearned for a way to bring more attention to their pickets. They liked the idea of Scabby but wanted their own look. So they designed a unique rat, one that’s more chill than the standard Scabby. A company that makes hot air balloons constructed the beast sometime between 1998-2001 — the exact year is unknown.

“It’s a one-off rat,” Breidegam said. And it quickly proved the equal of its Chicago-born cousins. “When we first started using it, it was very very effective at drawing attention,” Breidegam said. “Police would immediately show up to see what was going on.”

Local 66 loans Pittsburgh Scabby to a number of unions and work advocacy groups, and Scabby has made appearances as distant as Youngstown, Ohio. A few years ago, a Latin American labor organization inflated Scabby in Aspinwall after a roofing company failed to pay employees.

“He’s well loved and well used,” said James T. Kunz III, a member of Local 66 and administrator at the Pennsylvania Foundation for Fair Contracting, an organization that keeps an eye on wage fraud.

Well, Kunz added, Scabby is mostly well loved.

Several years ago, Local 66 members placed Scabby in the back of a pickup truck and showed him off in the city’s annual Labor Day Parade. Pennsylvania’s then-Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, attended the parade. “He was not happy,” Kunz said.

Scabby’s height proved an issue that day. Members had to partially deflate him so he could pass under trees along Grant Street and a footbridge over Boulevard of the Allies.

Until he was roused to assist striking Post-Gazette workers in October, Scabby slumbered. Advocating for workers can be exhausting, even for a balloon. 

“The rat was in the basement of one of the members of the operating engineers,” said Zack Tanner, president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh. “There was a hole in Scabby, so they patched him up.” 

He made his first appearance on behalf of the strikers outside the Butler Eagle newspaper, which continues to print the Post-Gazette during the strike. He was there for a week. Then Scabby showed up outside the Post-Gazette offices on the North Shore.

“Boy, was the Post-Gazette mad at us,” Tanner said. “They called the cops.”

Next came Scabby’s appearance on Sixth Avenue for the wedding of PG publisher John Robinson Block. Scabby has made a number of appearances since then, on the North Shore, at a rally in January at the City-County Building, and outside the homes of a few Post-Gazette managers.

Scabby spends his down time hibernating in a purple bag in the back of Tanner’s Subaru Outback — Tanner calls it the Rat’s Nest. Stored in the nest is a generator and electric pump needed to inflate Scabby, something Tanner has practiced.

“I can get Scabby up, get a picture of him and get him back in my car in 10 minutes,” he said.

Pittsburgh Scabby’s unique vibe, so different from his cousins and forebears, resonates with Tanner.

“The standard Scabby is more like a mockery toward scabs and bosses, anybody who’s against the working person,” Tanner said. “Ours is more like a representation of the working person. It’s a working rat.”

Local 66 member Kunz described Scabby as a “visual representation of the anger that workers have for conditions they have to deal with at work.”

And Scabby is designed to communicate that message in an era in which people drive past picket lines at 40 miles an hour. Signs don’t work so well in the auto age, but it’s hard to miss, or misunderstand, a giant inflatable rat with an attitude.

Which leads folks to wonder about Scabby’s role in the PG’s anti-rat ads.

“It’s so odd,” he said. “They’re trying to co-opt Scabby, the most famous union symbol of the modern era.”