You dirty Rats! (Unions, however, love their vermin)

There are rats and there are Rats.

The little ones dominate New York streets, depending on the mayor’s pest control budget.

But nothing stops the really big guys. Not even a kitchen knife.

These menacing inflatable gray rodents, some as tall as 25 feet, pop up in front of nonunion construction sites all over the city. They’re there to harass management. But with their angry pink eyes, protruding white fangs and pointy claws poised for attack -- not to mention the whirring of their portable air pumps -- these Rats can annoy the whole neighborhood.

Their appearance on city sidewalks was particularly fitting as New Yorkers fretted over a potentially crippling subway and bus strike. The strike was averted. But the Rats endure, unnerving reminders that labor unrest is never more than one ultimatum away.

“The challenge we have as a union is to get people to care about our issues,” said Richard Weiss, spokesman for a council of construction unions that employs almost a dozen gargantuan nylon Rats. “Unless you’re going to get up tomorrow and not have a bus or subway to get to work, people do not have labor on their minds.”

After many years of declining membership, unions are on the offensive again with grass-roots organizing and street-savvy Rats. Weiss is nothing but honest about whom the Rats are trying to attract. “You called, didn’t you?” he said. “It’s a lighthearted way to bring to the public and media’s attention to what’s going on.” He also claimed the Rat has a 60% success rate, with contractors caving and hiring union workers. Often this happens after another tenant -- say, a restaurant owner who doesn’t need a Rat hogging the entrance -- complains.

The Rat certainly overtakes the sidewalks it inhabits for weeks on end. From Fifth Avenue to Queens Boulevard, the inflatable rodent population has grown so much that now as many as 100 are working the region. The Rat even made an appearance on this season’s “Sopranos,” a theatrical brush with the mob that put Weiss momentarily on the defensive. “That’s not worth mentioning,” he said, quickly turning the conversation to two Rats stalking a high-rise on West 57th Street just off Fifth Avenue.

Anthony Williamson, an organizer for Local 79 Construction and General Building Laborers, led chants there this week as the fanged ones swayed in the cold winter wind:

Williamson: “What do you want?”

The shivering, shouting men: “Union.”

Williamson: “When do you want it?”

The men: “Nowwwwww.”

They erupted in a chorus that sounded vaguely like the Santa down the street in front of Tiffany’s: “Hey hey, ho ho, Lefrak Construction’s gotta go.”

Lefrak, the owner and manager of 40 W. 57th St., where eight floors are under renovation, has such a long history in New York real estate that a Queens neighborhood is called Lefrak City. Williamson, a native of Guyana, just can’t get over this: “They own a city, man, a whole city, and they can’t pay their workers more than $10 for pushing a broom?” In fact, the site’s workers are mostly union members. Only about a dozen are nonunion, mostly new immigrants being paid off the books, the union insists. But that’s enough, Williamson said, to make Lefrak a rat, a traditional labor term for a bad contractor. A Lefrak spokesman had this to say about the Rat and the union’s claims: “No comment.”

Tending a 15-foot Rat and guiding such protests is Williamson’s full-time salaried job. “It’s a dream,” he said. The union even paid for him to attend organizing courses at AFL-CIO George Meany Center outside Washington, D.C. “The union has given me such an opportunity.”

After a day that usually begins at 6 a.m. and wraps up after lunch, Williamson deflates his Rat (seven minutes up; two minutes down), folds him into a big bag and stores him in the back of a Ford Explorer. He has been known to inflate his Rat in front of his mother’s house in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. “She loves it,” Williamson said. “We’re a union family.”

Local 79 owns five Rats, and each one comes with a union-owned SUV and a minder like Williamson. Also available at a moment’s notice is a big van for impromptu protests like the one that occurred Wednesday. The union decided to ratchet up the pressure on a contractor at a YMCA in Queens. Rats all over the city left their posts and converged on the Y. While they resist labels like Rat Pack and Rat Patrol, they have that SWAT team swagger. “Sometimes we just pile 15 guys in the van and fold up the Rat and, boom, we roll,” said Williamson, his eyes bright with enthusiasm. “New York is a union city, and we mean business.”

The inventor of the Rat, however, hails from Chicago. He is Mike O’Connor, president and founder of Big Sky Balloons and Searchlights. He designed his first Rat in 1987 for a construction union in Chicago. He admits his goal was to make it as mean looking as possible. When the first one wasn’t churlish enough, O’Connor went back to the drawing board. Rodents now come in all sizes -- 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 feet tall and the King Rat, a 25-footer that costs $7,000 and is wheeled out only on special occasions. O’Connor has also expanded to cockroaches, bulldogs and, recently, skunks.

The renewed vigor of the labor movement has been great for sales all over the country. O’Connor let slip that two very big Rats, packed in a crate, are winging their way to Los Angeles, even as we speak.

But the Rats are still most closely identified with New York City and its peculiar street life, taking their place alongside fur-draped women swarming Madison Avenue and Senegalese salesmen hawking fake designer pocketbooks on every corner of Manhattan. Still, it’s kind of shocking to encounter a monster Rat on your lunch hour.

Terri Minsky, a successful television writer who splits her time between New York and Los Angeles, said she had fantasies of pricking the Rat that plagued her Upper West Side apartment building for several months earlier this year. (Indeed, several Rat attacks with knives and razors have been reported to the New York City Police.)

Minsky insisted the Rat that filled the view from her living room window “had none of the charms” of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons -- never mind that her children were overheard singing the union chant. Her Rat also came with a relentless team of whistle-blowers who would sometimes awaken the neighborhood at 8 a.m. Their beef, they said, was not with tenants like Minsky, but with the landlord, who was not using union carpenters to add six new floors to an old six-story building of rental apartments. But the tenants and neighbors came to detest the goonish tactics, nevertheless.

Still, with the mayor expected to cut the rat-control budget by almost a million dollars next year, a big stationary Rat full of hot air, even one with its own whistle chorus, may be a lot easier to live with than the real thing.

“We live with vermin in New York all the time,” said Minsky. “I would 100 times rather see that Rat than a live one.”