The booming high-tech sector has resisted organizing efforts, and unions still continue to lose nearly half of unionization elections.

N.Y.U. has not tried to block the unionization election, as it did when its graduate student assistants unionized.

As a desperate effort to thwart management's stunningly successful opposition to unionization elections, the new tactic makes sense.

The groups say they hope there will be a unionization election this summer.

Mr. Tamarin said that unionization elections were often tainted, arguing that companies often intimidate workers at one-on-one meetings into voting against unionizing.

In May, the Brown Graduate Employee Organization petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to schedule a unionization election.

Unite hopes to avoid unionization elections, which often turn into expensive battles.

In 1997, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union lost a unionization election at the sprawling plant, built in this rural town 75 miles south of Raleigh.

The commission ruled last month that the resident advisers were indeed employees and scheduled a unionization election for March 5.

"The right of workers to make their own free choice to join a union has been effectively canceled in a huge majority of unionization elections," Mr. Sweeney said.