In better times, she worked in a jewelry factory and he worked in a warehouse.

Like generations of immigrants before them, Laura and Amauris Caceres, both from the Dominican Republic, believed that hard work and a union wage in America could buy a better life.

"I think our best moment was right after we bought this house," Amauris said through a translator last week at his Pawtucket home. "We both had jobs and we didn't have rent."

That was five years ago. That was before the jewelry factory in Cranston where Laura worked closed, and the Homegoods warehouse in Mansfield, Mass., where her husband worked moved away.

Now, they work part time cleaning offices for $7.70 an hour. And those are union wages.

In Boston, the union wage for a janitor starts at $11.60 an hour -- $3.90 more than in Providence, according to Roxana Rivera, lead organizer for the Providence office of Local 615 of the Service Employees International Union.

The cost of living is part of the reason. The other part has to do with union clout.

In Boston, 90 percent of the commercial cleaning space is covered by a union contract, Rivera said, compared with about 60 percent in Providence.

"The amount the janitors make is in relation to the market, because it's about competition," she said. "The more nonunion contractors are under-bidding, the more depressed the wages will be."

The union's effort to nudge up janitors' pay by claiming a bigger footprint in Providence's downtown office space explains why Laura Ceseres, a janitor at One Financial Plaza, participated in a five-day fast last week outside the Turks Head building.

The fast, organized by the SEIU, the Jobs for Justice organization and other groups, is part of a national Justice for Janitors campaign waged in cities such as Denver, Pittsburgh, Sacramento and San Jose, Calif.

The union represents 300 janitors who clean commercial office buildings in Providence and targeted the Turks Head building because its cleaning contractor, Martins Maintenance Co., is nonunion.

Martins Maintenance was hired by a property manager for Evan J. Granoff, the owner of the building.

The Turks Head -- whose tenants include accountants, lawyers, brokers and bankers -- has become a central bargaining chip in the union's contract negotiations with an association of unionized cleaning companies.

At 146,000 square feet, the Turks Head could give the union the 65 percent of commercial cleaning space it needs in downtown Providence to reopen wage negotiations with the Maintenance Contractors of New England before a Dec. 2 deadline.

"Granoff is the last piece in that puzzle here," the union's Rivera said. "Granoff is the key to basically a better life for janitors here in downtown."

The Turks Head is just one Granoff property. Brothers Evan and Lloyd Granoff own 700,000 to 750,000 square feet of commercial and industrial property, including the Arcade, the Union Trust building -- home to the Federal Reserve banquet hall -- and the Heritage building.

Just down the block from the Turks Head building, the Granoff brothers and a Boston real-estate investor are building a $90-million, luxury condominium tower.

"We did hire Martins, yes," Evan Granoff said in a telephone interview last week. "We don't look at whether people are unionized or not unionized."

The protest over the Turks Head building contract has pitted the interests of a second-generation family business against those of Rhode Island's newer arrivals.

Manuel Martins Jr.'s father, a Portuguese immigrant, founded the cleaning company in the basement of his house in 1978. The elder Manuel E. Martins used to take his son with him on cleaning jobs.

"Five years old, I was cleaning floors with him on the weekends," Manuel Martins Jr. said. "We used to go all the way from Providence to Bristol for $5 to clean a carpet."

The Martins' family business now has accounts in Providence, Boston and even Connecticut. Martins declined to say how many people he employs. "Put it this way," he said, "we're under 300."

Four employees clean the 16-story Turks Head building, Martins said. Like most of his workers, he said, they work part time.

"Some people have full-time jobs during the day for other companies," Martins said. "They work at restaurants, at jewelry companies, at schools. You have a high turnover in the cleaning companies."

The union organizers say the Martins Maintenance janitors assert they are being paid less than the union wages.

"Workers have reported to us that they make $7.50 an hour," Rivera said in an e-mail last week. "The building manager of the Turks Head . . . in our meeting with Evan Granoff on Sept. 6, 2005, stated to Evan Granoff that Martins Maintenance started at $7.50."

That's wrong, said Martins.

"We start at $8.50 an hour," he said.

All of the other local contractors he competes with, he said, are nonunion.

Martins won the cleaning contract for the Turks Head, he said, from a big, out-of-state union company.

Janitors' pay is not much, he said, but they have other ways to make money.

"They have the opportunity to go to school, just like us," Martins said. "They can go to a trade school. They're human beings. They can do whatever they want in this world."

The couple have found opportunities hard to come by.

They can't find full-time jobs, they've lost their private health insurance and some of their hope for the future.

Their household income last year, Amauris said, was about $14,000 -- nearly half of what it was in 2000.

She sells jewelry and clothes from a catalog; he drives people to appointments. And the state pays for their health coverage

"In my country, I had a lot of dreams," Laura, 43, said. "But when I got here and saw how hard things are, those dreams went down."

Next to her sat her husband, 45 -- a janitor at a Cranston office building wearing a sweatshirt that read, "God Bless America."

Laura spent two days fasting last week with three other janitors. They were joined by college students, community members and religious leaders.

"A lot of people came up to tell us that they supported us," Laura said. "It surprised me because there are people who aren't doing the fast but they also have a heart."

One afternoon, she said, a man dressed "muy elegante"climbed out of his car and handed out $5 gift certificates to seven of the fasters for the Au Bon Pain restaurant across the street.

Laura smiled and unfolded her gift certificate to show a reporter.

The name on it read, simply, "Kevin."

Lynn Arditi can be reached at (401)277-7335, or by e-mail at larditi [at] projo.com