PROVIDENCE -- Banging drums and shouting Spanish protest slogans, the people who help feed Brown University students gathered on campus yesterday to demand higher wages and cheaper health care.

The university has not begun negotiations on a new contract for members of Local 615 of the Service Employees International Union. But many of the 180 members -- including dishwashers, bakers and cooks -- are already publicly pressuring Brown to make concessions.

"We are taking a new attitude this time," said Christina Smith, 51, of Warwick, a baker and union negotiator. "We have issues and we're going to be heard."

The current contract expires on Oct. 12. Negotiations on a new contract are scheduled to start Sept. 14, said Joseph Faial, Brown's catering coordinator.

Union members and their supporters assembled yesterday in downtown Providence and marched to the College Hill campus. In speeches, chants and placards, they called on Brown to lower the contributions part-time employees pay toward their health-care premiums, and they argued that wages at Brown do not reflect the work performed.

Fany Santana has worked as a part-time dishwasher at Brown since she came to the United States from the Dominican Republic eight years ago. She said she is paid $250 for 30 hours of work a week and is required to pay $280 a month for her health care -- 50 percent of the health insurance premium. (Full-time food service workers pay 6 percent of their premiums, Faial said.)

In the summer, when Brown has no work for Santana, she said she sometimes goes without food.

"My coworkers and I are asking Brown to reward our years of hard work by making it possible for us to afford to visit a doctor," said Santana, 52, of Providence, speaking on the stone staircase of Faunce House, a 102-year-old building paid for in part by John D. Rockefeller Jr. "We came here," Santana added, to be "part of the American dream."

Michael E. Chapman, a university spokesman, defended Brown's labor practices. "Brown treats its employees with respect, dignity and fairness," he said in a statement yesterday. "We are committed to engaging in good-faith negotiations to yield a wage-and-benefit package that continues to be fair to all of our employees."

The Labor Day march -- jointly sponsored by the Comite de Immigrantes en Accion (Immigrants in Action Committee) of St. Teresa Church, in Providence, and Rhode Island Jobs with Justice -- also dealt with broader themes of immigration reform and workers' rights.

At the 4:30 p.m. rally, union leaders spoke in English and Spanish beneath a banner asking employers to "Reward Hard Work." Many wore purple SEIU T-shirts and gave speeches that elicited cheering and the furious shaking of pebble-filled water bottles.

"We are celebrating the contributions of hard-working people," said the Local 615 president, Rocio Saenz, a slight, bespectacled woman and a fiery orator.

She criticized Brown as a wealthy institution that, she contended, shortchanges its workers, many of whom are immigrants. "We are part of this community, part of this city, this state and country."

About half of the Local 615 members are immigrants, and they cheered loudly as Juan Garcia, an organizer for the Comite de Immigrantes en Accion, called on Congress and President Bush to halt the deportation of illegal immigrants and enact immigration reform.

"We're finishing the summer and starting the winter," Garcia said, after alluding to the large-scale immigrant-rights rallies held across the country in the spring and summer. "Are we going to let Congress push us back into the shadows?"

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