WASHINGTON — Unite Here, the 440,000-member union of hotel, restaurant and garment workers, announced its withdrawal yesterday from the AFL-CIO, joining three other major unions that have defected from the federation to form the Change to Win Coalition.

Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 5 of Hawai'i is affiliated with Unite Here.

The departures leave the AFL-CIO with about 9 million members, down from 13 million before the Service Employees International Union, International Brotherhood of Teamsters and United Food and Commercial Workers announced during the summer that they were pulling out.

John Wilhelm, one of two national co-presidents of Unite Here, said the union is committed to spending half its revenue on organizing campaigns, and that a principal focus will be persuading immigrant workers to join unions.

"Unions are the only institution in 21st-century America that can reverse the decline of the standards of living of most Americans," Wilhelm said. "Immigrants are refueling the labor movement."

Unite Here and the other breakaway unions say they have left the AFL-CIO because the federation has failed to stem the steady decline in the number of workers represented by labor organizations.

Eric Gill, Unite Here's secretary-treasurer in Hawai'i, said last night from a meeting of the international union in St. Paul, Minn., that the new movement will try to galvanize labor and revitalize organizational efforts among U.S. workers "to rebuild the labor movement."

Gill said the 11,000 hotel and restaurant workers in Hawai'i who belong to Local 5 would not see any changes in their wages or working conditions. "All the contracts we have with employers in Hawai'i will remain in force," Gill said.