The best tires arrive at Bob’s Tire ready to be painted and resold; the rest are disassembled and recycled. Conveyor belts spin day and night adding shredded rubber to piles that rise like hills above the houses in New Bedford’s surrounding North End.
Until this month, the business employed around 65 men, most of them from a rural province of Guatemala. Regardless of their immigration status, migrants from El Quiché know Bob’s Tire as a place they can find a job, and maybe a few for their relatives too.
Recently, though, the arrangement has started to fall apart.
A video recorded on Oct. 25 by the freelance journalist Gerardo Beltrán shows a New Bedford police officer leading a handcuffed worker into a crowd of protesters. In another video from the same morning, the worker, Alfredo Mateo, tells Beltrán he was arrested during a work stoppage inside the company’s gates.
“I have the right to protest,” Mateo said in Spanish, shortly after he was released without charges. “They are paying me a miserable $13.50 per hour. I’m asking for a right to vacation and time for breaks during the day.”
Mateo and roughly two dozen of his coworkers who participated in the protest were fired the next day, according to interviews with several people who attended the protest. Mateo, technically a temporary worker jointly employed by an independent staffing agency, said he had been working full time at Bob’s Tire for eight years.
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