• More than two dozen Bremerton Coca-Cola Enterprises employees went on strike Monday as part of a walkout that involves nearly 500 employees around Washington state.

• In Kazakhstan, a threatened hunger strike by 48 workers building the Almaty subway has succeeded in getting them three months’ back pay. The workers, all from one shift, went on a general strike for three days last week, refusing to work until they got their salaries.

• On August 23, about 100 steel workers at the Hormozgan Steel Complex in Southern Iran staged a protest gathering. The workers were protesting 300 workers not having received back wages in the last three months.

• Around 160 garment workers in Cambodia continued to strike on Monday outside the gates of a factory in Meanchey district, where they have camped out day and night since Thursday to agitate for improved working conditions.

• Thousands of Honduran workers marched in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula on Aug. 18 to demand an increase in the minimum wage and to show solidarity with teachers who were in the 14th day of an open-ended strike.

• Last Thursday, the workers at Kian Tire in Iran went on strike closing down the gates of the factory warehouses. The workers were demanding back wages.

• Women bared their breasts to fight for the same right to go topless as men, during protests in Venice Beach, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Denver, Miami Beach and Seattle on Sunday.

• Singing choruses of “we shall not be moved” while scattering sunflower seeds, 14 activists were arrested in Kansas City on Monday after blocking an earth moving vehicle on the site of a proposed nuclear weapons manufacturing facility.

• Last Friday, around 35 Palestinians demonstrated against Hallamish settlement with around 15 Israeli and international peace activists in the village of An Nabi Salih.

• German workers on Tuesday protested against what their union says are plans by the country’s central bank to have euro banknotes printed by foreign companies.

• Some Pakistani flood victims blocked highways to demand government help on Tuesday.

• Three television channels in Ukraine went on strike on Saturday in protest of steadily increasing pressure on media in Ukraine, with hundreds of other journalists declaring readiness to join the action.

• Students from various schools and universities in the Philippines traded the four corners of their classrooms for the streets last Friday to join the National Youth Walkout and appeal for more government support for the education sector.

• On Monday, hundreds of protesters started a sit-in outside the legislature, fueled by mounting anger over the government’s cross-strait policies and the expected passage of a controversial trade agreement with China later this week.

• The 19-day long protest in Bolivia’s Potosi province was finally brought to an end with the protesters lifting the blockade of the airport and major roads after a deal was struck with the government.

• The entire team of Sri Lanka’s government wildlife vets has gone on strike amid mounting controversy over an elephant conservation plan that has led to increased clashes between the animals and villagers.

• About a hundred net neutrality activists left their laptops at home Friday afternoon to gather at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters to protest the search giant’s perceived betrayal of the movement for federal internet openness rules. The protest group’s ranks included eager young activists, long-time technologists, first-time protesters and the ever-present Raging Grannies, who led anti-Google sing-alongs set to classic Americana songs.

• Around 1,000 Senegalese opposition supporters took to the streets on Saturday to protest President Abdoulaye Wade’s regime, saying they were fed up with power cuts, floods, and rising food costs.

• In Haiti, dozens of protesters held a sit-in at the National Palace Thursday to oppose the forced evictions of thousands of displaced residents from makeshift camps. The Haitian government has been urged to issue a moratorium on all forced evictions until alternative shelter options can be provided.

• Two Korean priests are publicly fasting outside a government building in the latest protest against the highly controversial Four Rivers project, which they believe will be detrimental to the environment.

• Iranian opposition members in Germany are staging a two-day hunger strike to demand a stop executions and an international investigation of prisons in their home country. A group of 20 on Friday chanted slogans such as “Stop stonings” and “Free political prisoners” on Berlin’s most prominent public spot at the Brandenburg Gate, two days after the purported TV confession of an Iranian woman facing death by stoning on adultery charges.

• On Saturday, all the taxi drivers in the provincial city of Dégolan‌ in Iranian Kurdistan went on strike parking their taxi cabs by the Bolbanabad terminal to protest a 20 day interruption in the compressed natural gas supplies.

• Sunday’s game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Washington Nationals was briefly interrupted by protesters urging commissioner Bud Selig to move the 2011 All-Star Game from Phoenix because of Arizona’s new immigration legislation.

• A group of desperate job-hunters—who’ve been out of work so long their unemployment benefits ran out—staged a protest rally on the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street yesterday to demand that the Senate pass the Tier 5 unemployment extension.

• A crowd of approximately 35 gathered at JP Morgan Chase’s offices in San Francisco on Tuesday to demand that banks and private equity firms pay California counties millions in overdue real estate taxes related to corporate acquisitions stemming from the economic crisis.

• Four Greenpeace activists climbed onto the roof of Poland’s environment ministry in Warsaw this week to protest the government’s lackluster defence of the Bialowieza Primeval Forest, one of Europe’s most precious environments.

• Employees at the Mott’s apple processing plant in Williamson, N.Y., have been on strike for at least two months with no end in sight, as the company insists on wage cuts despite posting record profits.

• A crowd of about 300 villagers in Kabul blocked a main road in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday to protest the killing of three innocent villagers by US Forces. In the first six months of this year, 386 civilians were killed by NATO or Afghan government forces.

• Police arrested five of about 100 protesters gathered outside a Minneapolis hotel yesterday, trying to deliver petitions to commissioner Bud Selig to move the 2011 All-Star game out of Arizona because of that state’s new immigration law.

• Expatriate Kashmiris and Pakistanis from different parts of the United Kingdom staged a big demonstration in front of 10-Downing Street on Thursday to protest against British Prime Minister David Cameron’s remarks on issues of Pakistan and Kashmir.

• Public sector workers went on strike across South Africa Tuesday, closing schools and wreaking havoc on a wide array of public services. As many as 1.3 million people were expected to walk off their jobs. Between 10,000 and 100,000 workers also demonstrated Tuesday across five provinces.

• Dozens of construction workers building a subway in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, have vowed to begin a hunger strike today to demand three months of unpaid wages.

• On Monday, a few dozen Embassy Suites workers who claim they are routinely denied breaks walked off the job in Irvine, California.

• Anti-government protesters in Bolivia tightened their siege of Potosi on Saturday, launching a hunger strike and cutting rail links to Chile, as tourists began negotiating their way out of the mining city, 10 days into the blockade.

• Nine protesters were arrested for blocking the main gate to Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor on Monday. They were among members and supporters of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, which holds an annual vigil at the base on the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

• More than 30,000 truck drivers in the Dominican Republic went on a 24-hour strike yesterday to protest a government proposal to raise the fuel tax.

• Workers at the Post-Gazette walked out at Noon on Monday to protest pending staff cuts the paper says are needed to stay afloat.

• In India, Yoga Guru Baba Ramdev staged a sit-in protest at Haridwar with a demand to halt the hydropower projects across River Ganga and also to protect the river from further exploitation and pollution. Several Hindu monks also accompanied Baba Ramdev in this crusade.

• A three-day strike launched on Monday by customs workers in Ivory Coast over benefits that have been withheld is blocking exports of cocoa from the world’s top grower of the beans.

• Through a series of well-choreographed steps, a tiger-themed flash mob called “Freeze Tiger Trade” spearheaded by WWF-Malaysia turned heads and attracted attention on the status of our Malayan tigers here in Kuala Lumpur.

• In Turkey, nongovernmental organizations in the eastern province of Batman held a silent march and sit-in demonstration yesterday in protest of a mine explosion that claimed the lives of four people on Monday.

• On Wednesday, unionized workers of the West Indies Paper Products Limited in Jamaica walked off the job to protest against what they claimed was the failure of the management to improve wage and fringe benefits.

• More than 100 people at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in England went on hunger strike on Wednesday.

• In Azerbaijan, ten opposition activists jailed for participating in an unsanctioned rally calling for free elections in central Baku on July 31 have declared a hunger strike.

• Around 120 Chinese seasonal berry pickers in northern Sweden went on a 15-kilometre (9.3-mile) march overnight to Friday to protest their salaries

• In Malaysia, police forcefully broke up peaceful candlelight vigils held on August 1, against the Internal Security Act (ISA), and arrested 36 people in Petaling Jaya and Penang.

While protest in China is far more widespread than most people recognize, recent high-profile strikes by workers in China, which we’ve noted on this site, appear to be having an effect, according to The Guardian.

Officials in Guangdong province – for years the country’s manufacturing heartland – are debating proposals which activists say could be a landmark, allowing workers to democratically elect representatives to carry out collective bargaining.

“The pressure of low pay, long working hours and poor working conditions that gave rise to the wave of strikes across Guangdong have elicited a timely and positive response from the government,” said Han Dongfang, executive director of the Hong Kong-based group China Labour Bulletin.

He said it showed an important change in the government’s attitude towards workers’ reasonable economic demands.

According to Chinese media, the revised draft law states that if more than a fifth of the workforce at a factory ask for wage negotiations with management, the trade union branch must organise the democratic election of representatives. If the company does not have a union, the nearest district union must arrange the vote. Union leaders in China are appointed officials and independent unions are not permitted.

Interesting, one economics professor in China interviewed in the piece says that workers are feeling empowered by the internet, where despite of government censorship, they have been able to read about how strikes have successfully won better wages and working conditions in other Chinese factories.

• Several Greenpeace activists were arrested after rappelling off the Calgary Tower yesterday morning to hang a banner attacking the relationship between the oilsands industry and government.

• Hundreds of Afghans have taken to the streets in the southwestern Helmand province to voice their anger at the killing of a 65-year-old man by US troops. Another demonstration was held in the southern Oruzgan province over the alleged desecration of Islam’s holy book, the Quran, by US forces.

• Two men carrying Mexican flags in protest of Arizona’s immigration law ran onto the outfield during the seventh inning of the New York Mets’ game against the Arizona Diamondbacks Friday night at Citi Field. Prior to the game, about 40 people across the street from the ballpark chanted “Oppose racism!” and “Boycott Arizona!”

• Several hundred Red Shirt protesters defied a state of emergency in the Thai capital on Monday to stage a symbolic protest, with hundreds of people sprawling on the ground and chanting, “People died here!”

• An estimated 30,000 people, consisting of tourists and residents, linked hands on the Thai island of Koh Samui on Saturday afternoon to protest oil exploration due to start in the Gulf of Thailand.

• Advocates for New York City’s community gardens delivered fresh produce to the steps of city hall Monday to protest the expiration of the Garden Settlement of 2002, which protected community gardens from real estate developers.

• About half the detainees at the 216-bed Campsfield House immigration centre in Oxfordshire Britain are refusing meals to protest their prolonged detention and treatment, which has caused many to suffer from mental health problems.

• About 600 employees of a Volvo bus plant in India have been on strike for a week to demand better pay and the return to work of four colleagues suspended following a dispute at the plant.

• This past Friday, in Bryant Park  in New York, Medicare celebrated it’s 45th birthday with a flash mob of over one hundred singing and dancing protesters that warned President Obama’s newly created Deficit Commission to keep their hands off Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

• South African government ministers met with public sector workers’ unions to try to end an open-ended wage strike by 210,000 teachers, nurses and other state employees that began last Thursday and prevent it from spreading.

• Greek truck drivers’ associations say they will continue a protest that has halted fuel supplies across the country and is hurting tourism, despite an emergency order by the government to force them back to work.

• Hundreds of hotel and restaurant employees and supporters were arrested around the US Thursday in coordinated civil disobedience against the Hyatt Corporation. Fifteen cities saw protests.

• A group of families of political prisoners gathered in front of the office of the General Prosecutor to protest the lack of information about the situation of their loved ones, especially those political prisoners who went on hunger strike in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison last week. Meanwhile, it was reported yesterday that anti-riot units and Special Forces barged into the facility  after learning of prisoners’ mass hunger strike.

• More than 200 Afghans participated in a rally in the capital Kabul on Sunday to protest the alleged NATO killing of 52 civilians on July 23, in the Sangin district of Helmand province.

• Some 800 dockers and activists staged a rally in Indonesia on Saturday to demand that a major port operator honor a negotiated agreement.

• After 90 days, a mass hunger strike by laid-off electrical workers in the center of Mexico City came to an end on July 23 following a preliminary agreement between federal governance secretary José Francisco Blake Mora and the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) the night before.

• After teaching at the Bangladesh International School (English Section) in Jeddah, at least six teachers suddently found themselves to be jobless and staged a sit-in protest at the school premises to challenge their termination allegedly without any prior notice.

• In Nepal, around 50 Bhutanese refugees started relay hunger strike in Beldangi-I camp on Monday to demanding refugee status and donor’s support for their livelihood.

• Fiat workers went on strike Friday to protest against the size of a bonus and the firing of five of their colleagues in a sign of mounting tensions over Fiat’s plans for its operations in Italy.

• A protest by Greek air traffic controllers entered its second day Monday, forcing delays at scores of flights at Athens international airport as a separate walkout by truckers choked fuel supplies.

• The unexplained disappearance of a Coptic priest’s wife in Upper Egypt led to a sit-in staged by thousands of Copts at the Coptic Patriarchate in Cairo last Friday, to protest what they consider “collusion by the state security services.”

• About 30 people, including a priest, protesting working conditions in front of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Chicago were arrested by police Thursday in a staged act of civil disobedience.

• French air travel has suffered significantly since Tuesday morning when some air traffic controllers went on strike to protest the reorganization of European skyways.

• In Las Vegas, eight activists protesting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s inaction on gay rights legislation were arrested for blocking traffic at one of the Strip’s busiest intersections today.

• On Tuesday, about 20 undocumented youths held sit-ins and risked arrest at various congressional offices in Washington D.C., including California Senator Dianne Feinstein, to urge the passage of the DREAM Act.

• Yesterday morning, a group of Barriere Lake Algonquins set up a peaceful blockade on the access road leading to their reserve, about 300 km north of Ottawa. The defensive action was aimed at stopping a government-appointed electoral officer from holding a nomination meeting on the reserve for the government’s highly-controversial imposed Band Council Election.

• The Teamsters Union, the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, Clean New York, WEACT for Environmental Justice, concerned parents, students and consumer activists protested toxic PVC plastic used in toys at the Toys R Us flagship store in Times Square yesterday.

• Rainforest Action Network activists disrupted Massey CEO Don Blankenship’s talk at the National Press Club yesterday sending by holding up two large banners that said:“Massey coal – not Clean, Safe or Forever.” They were eventually escorted out by security.

I’m all for protesting budget cuts that will negatively affect hospitals and health care, but doctors in Italy went too far on Monday. According to the AP:

An Italian doctors’ union says more than 40,000 operations have been delayed by a one-day strike against the government’s austerity plans.Medical workers are protesting outside parliament in Rome to protest expected shortages of medical workers in the system because of government plans to not renew many temporary contracts.

While they say they only refused non-emergency surgeries, I don’t see how doctors or nurses refusing to care for their patients to register their dissent about low wages – or anything else for that matter – can be justified.

There are very few sectors that I would say should never go on strike, but medical professionals would be one. Too many lives are in their hands. And it is not the officials or executives responsible for their predicament who are most affected by such actions, but the patients themselves.

• On Tuesday, a group of volunteers toting vuvuzelas gathered outside of BP’s International Headquarters in London and sounded their barbaric yelps in protest of the way the company is handling the oil spill in the Gulf.

• A strike has broke out at a south China factory supplying parts for Japan’s Honda Motor on Monday, with about 90 of the plant’s 200 workers stopping work to demand a nearly 60 percent pay increase.

• Croatian police arrested more than a hundred people on Thursday, including actors, writers and city officials, after they staged a peaceful rally to prevent private construction works in the heart of the capital.

• PETA, Last Chance for Animals, and other activists were in downtown Los Angeles at the Staples Center Wednesday night to protest the opening of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. They called for a boycott of the circus based on the disturbing photos that had been turned over to PETA by an industry whistleblower.

• Workers at Nokia’s Chennai factory in south India went on strike on Tuesday, demanding higher wages. The factory is a key hub for the manufacture of mobile handsets and employs 8,000 workers.

• Flights to and from Greece were grounded for four hours on Thursday and state hospitals operated with skeleton staff as air traffic controllers and doctors joined public sector workers in another nationwide strike against labour reforms and austerity measures.

• A recently established student movement pushing for reform of Taiwan’s assembly law, which restricts people’s right to demonstrate, announced their plan today to expand their ongoing sit-in protest at Taipei’s Liberty Square that began last Friday.

• Thousands of protesters poured into the center of the main city of Indian Kashmir on Thursday after authorities lifted restrictions for the first time in five days. The Muslim-majority region has been wracked by demonstrations since June 11 when security forces were accused of killing a 17-year-old. Since then, another 14 protesters and bystanders have been killed.

• On Thursday, activists with Rainforest Action Network staged a sit-in  at EPA Headquarters in Washington, where they occupied the lobby and used metal lock boxes to lock themselves together.  The action was to bring attention to EPA’s newly approved Pine Creek mountaintop removal permit in Logan County, West Virginia.

• Newsstands were mostly empty, Internet sites weren’t updated and the airwaves were practically news-free in Italy on Friday as journalists went on strike to protest Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s bid to restrict wiretaps, a move he says is to protect the privacy of everyday Italians while journalists claim it’s a gag law aimed at protecting him and corrupt officials.

• On Saturday, calling it a Day of Action for Civil Liberties, some 1,200 protestors marched from Queen’s Park to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to protest how police and governments are handling the G20 summit aftermath.

• Guillermo Fariñas, an opposition activist in Cuba, ended a 134-day hunger strike on Thursday, after indications that the government would make good on its promise to release 52 political prisoners.

• Defying curfew, thousands of people protested across the Valley in Kashmir for the fifth consecutive day Friday against the killing of unarmed civilians. he protesters staged a sit-in on the Cement Bridge for nearly 30 minutes.

• The National Health Service in Britain said they would immediately reinstate round-the-clock care to Angela Caviill-Burch’s quadriplegic husband after she went on hunger strike last week.

• In a protest against the unofficial ban imposed by the Sindh Government in Pakistan on the movement of wheat, flour mills across Punjab continued to observe a complete strike for the fifth continuous day on Monday.

• On Thursday four members of a group from Dalga Youth Organization were arrested as they held a flash-mob action of protest in front of the Presidential Administration of Azerbaijan. The youth activists were marking the one year anniversary of the arrest of the bloggers Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli.

• In Pakistan, a shutter-down strike was observed in Quetta and southern districts of Balochistan on Thursday to protest against the rationing of electricity and increasing cases of kidnapping for ransom.

Working In These Times has an interesting post about the decline of labor activism in the United States. According to new figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union elections have dropped by 60% from 1997-2009 and only five “major strikes” (involving 1,000 workers or more) occurred last year—the lowest number since BLS began recording strike data in 1947. Working attributes these declines to three factors—unionbusting, outsourcing, and union leader incompetency.

As labor power weakens, employers have doubled their use of illegal unionbusting tactics since the 1990s, according to a study by Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Currently, 34 percent of employers fire union activists to intimidate other workers from joining a union. Studies show that without such threats, 58 percent of the workforce would be willing to join a union. But intimidation tactics make that virtually impossible.

The threat of outsourcing makes it increasingly difficult for unions to organize workers as well. Since 2000, 2 million jobs in the more heavily unionized manufacturing jobs have been lost to China. Outsourcing causes unions to not only lose members, but makes it tougher for unions to organize new members.  In 57% of all union drives, employers threaten to move factories if workers unionize—a threatthat  is very real.

Labor leaders also have played a very big role in labor’s decline. While the labor movement has lost 1.1 million members, the salary of top labor officials’ salaries has nearly tripled, according to a recent study by Labor Notes. If unions capped their total annual compensation at $150,000, they would save the labor movement $143 million dollars annually. At a time when unions are laying off young organizers as they lose members, there’s no reason why officials should take such exorbitant salaries.

This is important gut-check analysis, as it will hopefully help labor think about solutions to these problems, which admittedly aren’t easily solvable. But American labor activists can look to other countries, where strikes are quite prominent, such as the UK, for inspiration and advice on overcoming these hurdles.