The NLRB has ruled that placing a giant inflatable rat outside a secondary employer’s business is not coercive and thus legal under current labor law. In 2006, the Board ruled in Sheetmetal Workers Local 15 that a mock funeral held outside of an acute care facility was coercive. The hospital was targeted by the Sheetmetal Workers union for using non-union contractors. Based on the Sheetmetal decision, the Board saw no need to rule separately on rats. The U.S. Court of Appeals overturned that decision in 2007 and sent it back to the Board to be reconsidered along with those cases, like the rat, that were covered by the original Sheetmetal decision. The Act prohibits actions that “threaten, coerce or restrain” a secondary employer not directly involved in a labor dispute if the object is to get the secondary employer to stop doing business with the union’s true target. The Board majority ruled that the rat is not threatening or coercive but “symbolic” and an “expression” of free speech. Dissenting Member Hayes found that the rats are coercive, and therefore unlawful. “Considered in the abstract, or viewed from afar, the display of a gigantic inflated rat might seem more comical than coercive,” Member Hayes wrote. “Viewed from nearby, the picture is altogether different and anything but amusing. For pedestrians or occupants of cars passing in the shadow of a rat balloon, which proclaims the presence of a “rat employer” and is surrounded by union agents, the message is unmistakably confrontational and coercive.”
