Hundreds of workers at a critical port in the United Kingdom walked off the job on Tuesday, touching off a two week strike in demand of higher wages that threatens to pinch an already squeezed global supply chain. The work stoppage may preview a wave of labor tumult poised to convulse the British economy in the weeks ahead, as hundreds of thousands of disaffected workers across a sweeping range of sectors — from bus drivers to garbage collectors to railway operators to college lecturers — are preparing to strike amid the nation’s deepening cost-of-living crisis.

In the latest organizing news, workers at a Home Depot store  in Philadelphia filed an election petition on Monday covering a unit of nearly 300 retail employees. The organizing drive reflects a recent surge of “independent unionization,” as embodied in the recent triumphs of the Amazon Labor Union, Starbucks Workers United, Trader Joe’s Union, Apple Retail Union, Chipotle United, REI Union, and Geico United, to name a few.

Home Depot remains the world’s largest home improvement retailer. Should the union, Home Depot Workers United, prevail in the upcoming election, the Philly store would become the first of the company’s more than 2,000 U.S. locations to unionize.

In employment law news, New Jersey’s labor enforcement agency announced Tuesday that Chipotle Mexican Grill has agreed to pay $7.7 million to settle “widespread and persistent violations” of the state’s child labor laws. The news surfaces on the heels of a similar announcement in New York City, which last month entered into a $20 million agreement — the largest in the city’s history — with Chipotle to settle wage and hour violations, as I outlined here.