because what happened to him could happen to any of us.  They said they'd left soap on the plates, because lots of others got diarrhea. I got it too.  But this boy died."     According to Goldstein, for current H2-A workers "things have improved here a little.  Today workers complain that the food often isn't culturally appropriate, but no one's dying of food poisoning. But if a much larger guest worker system is reestablished, it really would look like what we had during the bracero program.  How else could they manage such a workforce?  And for the H2-A's, it already exists.""     US farm workers and their unions fear guest workers because of the way braceros were used to replace resident workers in during the program's 22 year history, from 1942-1964.  "The growers are lobbying for a new guest worker law on the grounds that there is not enough labor available," says Lucas Benitez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a community-based project organizing farm workers in south Florida.  "But it's a lie.  Everyday in the papers you read about the high numbers of unemployed workers.  The problem is that most workers in this country do not want to do the work we do for wages we're paid.  We average seven thousand five hundred dollars a year and the conditions of exploitation are such that any reasonable person would prefer receiving unemployment benefits.  The answer to the guest worker lobbying effort is to raise wages and improve working conditions."     During the 1950s, growers brought in braceros when their existing workforce struck, or threatened to do so.  That threat allowed them to undermine the ability of the farm workers of that era to demand higher wages.  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Cesar Chavez, then an organizer for the Community Service Organization in Oxnard, California, mounted farm worker protests over the program. He later said that organizing the United Farm Workers would have been impossible had it not been halted in 1964.  In fact, the great grape strike in which the union was born began the following year.     But braceros did not always willingly acquiesce in their exploitation.  California's legendary immigrant rights campaigner, Bert Corona, recalls in his autobiography not only that braceros sometimes went on strike, but that local Latino communities would bring them food and try to prevent their deportation.     Garcia also remembers strikes.  "The foremen really abused people," he says.  "A lot was expected of you, and they always demanded even more.  But there were places where braceros stopped work.  One of my brothers went on strike in Phoenix because they were picking cotton and the crop was bad.  They threatened to send them back to Mexico, and put them on a bus to El Centro. My brother, one of the leaders, got strikes into his blood, and later worked with Cesar Chavez for many years.  Me too. When the farm workers' movement came along, we already knew how to organize from people who'd participated in those conflicts."     But while some braceros may have fought to change conditions, and small rebellions may have raised the wages temporarily, the threat of deportation was enough to stop any larger strike and union effort until 1965.     Rebellions among H2-A workers aren't unknown either.  In 1986, Jamaican sugar cane workers in Florida stopped work to try to raise the piece rate.  Growers called in the sheriffs, who sicced dogs on the strikers, and the dispute became known as the Dog Wars.         [Continue]