JOE HILL IN THE HAMPTONS.(The Talk of the Town)(Writers Guild of America East's writes children's show, "It's a Big, Big World")

Any resort town's list of unwelcome visitors would have to include picketing workers and giant rodents. These days, East Hampton has both. Last month, aggrieved members of the Writers Guild of America East set up a picket line outside Wainscott Studios, a television-production facility, where "It's a Big, Big World," a new PBS children's show with a non-guild writing staff, is shooting. They brought with them a familiar labor mascot, a fifteen-foot-tall inflatable rat, on loan from the Musicians Local 802. Since then, demonstrators have been showing up every weekday at the studio, to chant slogans, demand negotiations, and shout one name over and over: Mitchell Kriegman.

Kriegman is the creator and producer of "It's a Big, Big World," which uses puppets to teach children about earth science. It is set in the rain forest, and its cast includes a sloth named Snook, a nervous anteater, a pair of marmosets, and a turtle with a map of the world on its shell. (There is no rat.) Last spring, Kriegman assembled a group of writers, many of whom had worked on his earlier show "Bear in the Big Blue House." Then, in May, Kriegman offered the writers a deal that paid a third of the W.G.A. minimum, without a guarantee of benefits, and they walked. Soon after, the guild put Kriegman on its strike list, and he brought in non-union writers. Among the scabs, the strikers say, were Kriegman's assistant and her sister, a former hairdresser, though Kriegman denies this.

One recent morning, a handful of writers milled in front of Wainscott Studios, carrying signs bearing such slogans as "Big, Big Pig." A succession of Hummers, Escalades, and BMW convertibles roared past the picket line, some of them honking in apparent solidarity at the sight of the hovering rat, with its red eyes, buck teeth, and scrofulous belly.

Amanda Bell, a W.G.A. organizer, tried to get things going with some chants from her days with the largely Spanish-speaking hotel and restaurant workers' union. "Se ve, se siente--la union esta presente!" she sang, but it didn't catch on. The writers themselves mostly shouted slogans of their own devising. Raye Lankford, who writes for the PBS animated series "Arthur," kept up a steady stream of patter through a bullhorn, veering from invective ("Who caused this problem? Mitchell Kriegman! Who can solve this problem? Mitchell Kriegman!") to pathos ("We're sending ...