125 Years Strong – An IUOE History

INTERNATIONAL UNION OF OPERATING ENGINEERS
in the operating engineers’ union gradually
diminished and the open-shop movement
gained new ground.
Among some of the key projects on which
some operating engineers were able to work was
construction of the Louisiana Offshore Oil
Port (LOOP) in the marshlands along Bayou
Lafourche in southeastern Louisiana in 1980
and 1981. When completed, the $600-million
LOOP would be the nation’s first offshore,
deep-water port for supertankers, allowing them
to offload and store oil at the marine terminal
located approximately 19 miles offshore in
110-foot-deep water of the Gulf of Mexico.
Other I.U.O.E.-manned jobs included
members of Local No. 701 in Portland
constructing the first large-scale segmental
bridge in the United States across the Columbia
River to connect Portland and Vancouver,
Washington, when it opened in 1983.
Elsewhere that year, engineers with Baltimore’s
Local No. 37 and Brooklyn’s Local No. 25
put the last of 32 tubes in place for the new
Fort McHenry Tunnel, which was being built
under Baltimore’s downtown Inner Harbor.
When completed in 1985, it would be the first
tunnel in the world to have been constructed
with tubes having been placed side-by-side in a
dredged underwater trench.
But throughout those years, the union’s
membership slide continued, and by 1986 it was
down by nearly 60,000 members from 1979.
“They were a tumultuous five or six years, to say
the very least, during which time the outlook for
the I.U.O.E. and other building-trades unions
was not exactly bright,” General President Larry
Dugan Jr., who took over for retired General
‘Scabby the Rat’
GLOBAL LABOR SYMBOL WAS BRAINCHILD OF CHICAGO LOCAL
“Scabby the Rat is a symbol of the labor movement, one which we have never hesitated
to defend on the street, in court or in the halls of government. And we never will.”
– I.U.O.E. Local 150 Business Manager James Sweeney,
November 2019 Local 150 Engineer newsletter
When he took over 10,000-member-strong I.U.O.E. Local
No. 150 of Chicago in 1986, new Business Manager Bill Dugan
was set on increasing his local’s market share and membership
through large-scale organizing. “Getting the results we needed
required some creative thinking, to say the least,” current
Business Manager James Sweeney recalled in the local’s
November 2019 newsletter.
During a campaign to organize equipment rental and repair shops
in 1987 that would later evolve into “Operation Wrench,” the local
decided to make the concept of a “rat” contractor “a little bit easier
for the public to understand,” according to Brother Sweeney. With
that, Local 150 designed and commissioned several rat costumes
that its organizers wore to the sites of various labor disputes. “This
new method of attracting attention was particularly useful and almost
as much fun as drawing straws to see who had to put on the suit
every day,” Brother Sweeney remembered.
Inspired by an inflatable gorilla on the roof of a car at a nearby
auto dealership and the need to replace the heavy, hot costumes
with something that would garner more attention, the local’s
Organizing Department then commissioned production of its
very first inflatable rat, which sat atop an Oldsmobile owned by
Brother Monte Horne that the local painted yellow and christened
the “Rat Patrol.” In late 1989, the local held a contest among its
membership to name the inflatable rodent, which up to that point it
had simply called “Mr. Rat.” Brother Lou Mahieu received a leather
jacket in January 1990 for his winning submission, “Scabby,”
while the Oldsmobile was renamed the “Scab Tracker.”
“Scabby was a hit from the start,” Brother Sweeney recollected.
“We quickly deployed a fleet of Scab Trackers, and other unions
started to as well.” Local 150 also bundled Scabby and a Scab
Tracker with a generator and a suit and sold it as a “Rat Pack” to
other I.U.O.E. locals. Soon after, local building trades started to
purchase their own Scabbys, as well, and he quickly became a
fixture of Chicago’s labor movement – and has since ascended
to worldwide fame.
But while a steady run of judicial decisions have agreed that
the use of Scabby the Rat is protected free speech under the First
Amendment, it came under attack again in 2019 when the National
Labor Relations Board (N.L.R.B.), acting on a long-dismissed
complaint against Local 150 made by a non-union contractor,
asked a federal judge to classify the use of Scabby as a picket
and, therefore, make it subject to stricter
regulations. In an ironic twist of fate,
the judge hearing arguments over
the still-pending N.L.R.B.’s injunction
request was Judge Ruben Castillo,
who in 2001 wrote the very first
decision designating Scabby
as a tool of free speech.
I.U.O.E. Local No. 150 of Chicago deployed its original Scabby
the Rat and Rat Patrol during labor disputes (especially when
“scab” labor was involved) in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Members of I.U.O.E. Local No. 653 in Mobile,
Alabama, help build the Joseph M. Farley Nuclear
Generating Plant near Dothan, Alabama, in 1974.
President Turner in 1985, later recalled in the
April 1989 International Operating Engineer.
“The good news is that the I.U.O.E. weathered
the attacks and the setbacks.”
Knowing that the collective skill of its members
was its greatest asset, the I.U.O.E. incorporated
its apprenticeship and training program as a
“major weapon” in its counterattack against
anti-union forces and expanded its training
activities even as its membership declined. (2)
Still, it spent $25 million on training in 1980
alone, and training that year was provided
by 63 separate hoisting and portable training
programs, as well as stationary programs,
nationwide. An article in the February 1980
issue of The International Operating Engineer
even prophesied:
“By preserving and improving the
skills of members old and new, the
I.U.O.E. will meet the challenge of
the ‘80s and beyond.”
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