Like just about everyone else that doesn’t live in New York City, my first encounter with the Giant Inflatable Rat of Labor Unrest was on that episode of The Sopranos. I’ve seen a couple over the years and had always wondered what GIR’s creation story was like. Wonder no more…
“We’ve done cockroaches, skunks, bulldogs, even a corporate fat cat wearing a striped suit, smoking a cigar and choking a union worker,” said Mike O’Connor, owner of Big Sky Balloons & Searchlights, the Plainfield, Ill. company that designed and sells the rat.
O’Connor designed the rabid pest back in 1990, when a Chicago union man called asking for something his members could picket with, suggesting a “dirty rat kind of thing.”The first rat O’Connor designed was “basically a cutesy rat, but he wanted something mean, with fangs. So I went back to the drawing board and made the rat how he looks today.”
Unions all over the country order the rats – and recently an order came in from Nova Scotia – but New York, New Jersey and other northeastern states are O’Connor’s biggest clients. Big Sky sells about 100 of the inflatable rodents every year.
Not surprisingly, there’s the ubiquitous Flickr group for rat sightings.