AFL-CIO RESOLVED TO GROW.

Byline: Steven Greenhouse N.Y. Times News Service

Having roused the torpid AFL-CIO in his first year as president, John Sweeney will announce today the federation's ambitious all-out gamble to save the labor movement from further decline by shifting its focus to recruiting new members.

In moving the federation's emphasis toward organizing and away from politics, its thrust of last year, Sweeney hopes to reverse a 20-year slide in union membership, a trend that labor leaders see as a cancer that has sapped their strength in politics and at the bargaining table.

With the goal of attracting new members, Sweeney will propose at the AFL-CIO's winter meeting this week a $60 million advertising effort to burnish labor's image and a campaign to reach out to working women. He also will pledge to spend more than $2 million on labor's two biggest recruiting drives: organizing 20,000 strawberry workers in California and tens of thousands of construction, hotel and health care workers in Las Vegas.

In the four-day meeting, the labor leaders, meeting in an urban center instead of their traditional locale, a beach resort, will hear Vice President Al Gore discuss the labor standoff at American Airlines and refine their legislative agenda.

Sweeney undertakes his new organizing effort after his relatively successful first year as president. Under him, the federation raised its slouching public profile, pushed Congress into raising the minimum wage and excited college students about labor by enlisting more than 1,000 of them as summer interns. In addition, the federation spent $35 million to make itself a force to reckon with in politics, although its campaign efforts failed to achieve labor's big goal of returning the House to Democratic control.

Some labor experts caution that Sweeney's success at reawakening the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, an umbrella group that has 13 million members, was child's play compared with the task of recruiting millions more workers to unions.

``It will be 100 times harder,'' said Gregory Tarpinian, president of the Labor Research Association, a consulting group in New York. ``It will be the basis by which Sweeney is judged.''

The number of union members nationwide dropped by 92,000 last year and by 388,000 the year before; the percentage of American workers in unions has sunk to 14.5 percent, compared with 35 percent in the 1950s. With the work force growing by about 2 million people a year, unions will have to add almost 400,000 new members a year to keep from falling further behind - a tall order considering labor's recent slump and the crusade by many companies to keep out unions.

As part of Sweeney's effort to remake labor's flaccid image and show that union leaders care more about organizing workers than sunning themselves, the federation has moved its winter meeting out of the plush resort of Bal Harbour, Fla., for the first time in seven decades. Instead, AFL-CIO leaders will convene in downtown Los Angeles.