Dole Quitting at Labor for Top Red Cross Job : Administration: Only woman on Bush’s Cabinet had little impact on Administration policies. She’s the first to go.

Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Hanford Dole plans to resign today, becoming the first of President Bush’s Cabinet members to leave office, Administration officials said Tuesday.

Dole, 54, the only woman in the Cabinet, will become president of the American Red Cross, the officials said. Many Republican officials expect her to run for office in her native North Carolina in 1992.

Neither the Labor Department nor the White House offered official confirmation of the report, but President Bush, asked Tuesday night about the resignation as he attended a political fund-raiser in Connecticut, offered a one-word response: “Tomorrow.” A spokesman for AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland said that Dole had called Kirkland Tuesday afternoon to give him the news.

Bush plans to meet with Dole today, her husband, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), told reporters. The senator, who has been spending most of the last week mired in negotiations on the federal budget, jokingly brushed off questions about his wife’s plans.

“I don’t know anything about it. I haven’t been home in a week,” he said.

Speculation began immediately about possible successors, with early betting focusing on Constance Newman, head of the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s personnel office, and Rep. Lynn Martin (R-Ill.). Martin, a Bush favorite, is giving up her seat in the House to run for the Senate, a race in which she is now trailing badly. Newman is one of the highest ranking black officials in the Administration.

As labor secretary, Dole had only a restricted impact on Administration policy, never emerging as one of its central figures.

When the Administration negotiated with Congress over an increase in the minimum wage, for example, Bush’s chief negotiator was John H. Sununu, the White House chief of staff, not Dole. Sununu played a similar role in debates over child care and parental leave legislation, both major issues affecting the labor force.

Nonetheless, Dole received high marks from labor leaders for “accessibility,” for the warmth of her personal style and because she made clear from the outset that she intended to increase the role of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, whose funding had been severely cut during the Ronald Reagan Administration.

Dole was “not as good as we’d hoped for, but not as bad as we’d expected,” said Jack Henning, secretary-treasurer of the California Federation of Labor.

“Because of her husband’s attitudes and because she was appointed by a Republican President, we’d expected the worst,” Henning said. However, she turned out to be “as good a labor secretary as union leaders could have hoped for from a Republican administration.”

One of the chief successes in Dole’s 22 months as labor secretary was her intervention in a prolonged and bitter strike by 1,900 coal miners against Pittston Coal Co. in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky.

Dole visited a Virginia camp established by the United Mine Workers, spoke with strikers and then arranged for private talks between the miners and executives of the company, who had stopped speaking to each other. She later announced a tentative agreement and established a commission that helped resolve the stickiest issue of the strike, employer reluctance to absorb rising health costs among miners.

Early this year, Dole scored points with labor leaders by rebuking the management style of Frank Lorenzo, chairman of Eastern Airline’s parent company and the man labor seemed to hate most. Lorenzo was then involved in a bitter dispute with machinists who were striking against Eastern.

Also, Dole emphasized, to a degree unprecedented among recent labor secretaries, the need for business to pay more attention to the education and training of its work force.

Labor leaders and feminists applauded her decision to begin evaluating whether major corporations are promoting enough women into upper-level executive positions.

There had been speculation for some months that Dole might leave the labor post this year to begin laying the groundwork for a possible 1992 campaign for either senator or governor in North Carolina.

The state currently has a Republican governor, James G. Martin, whose term will expire in 1992. Sen. Terry Sanford, a Democrat, will also be up for reelection that year.

The Red Cross presidency, a $185,000-a-year post, has been open for more than a year. With a staff of 23,000, more than 1 million volunteers, a $1-billion annual budget and a highly positive public image, the job could be ideal for a politician seeking to gain private sector credentials after a long career in appointive government posts.

Recently, however, the organization has been through a period of unusual controversy. Earlier this year, a congressional panel charged that sloppy procedures led the organization to release infected blood, mix up records and violate AIDS testing procedures in its blood bank operations.

The Red Cross, which handles more than half the nation’s blood supply, objected to the charges of negligent blood safety practices but promised to take “corrective action.”

The organization’s disaster relief efforts also have been under scrutiny, particularly after disclosures that the Red Cross planned to shift to other parts of the country millions of dollars raised to provide relief for victims of the 1989 Bay Area earthquake.