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 strike may foreshadow a wave of labor tumult set to convulse the British economy in the weeks ahead, as hundreds of thousands of disenchanted workers across a sweeping range of sectors — from bus drivers to garbage collectors to railway operators to college lecturers — prepare 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, and should the union — Home Deport Workers United — prevail in the election, this Philly store would become the first of the company’s more than 2,000 U.S. locations to organize a union.

New Jersey’s labor agency announced on 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 is striking in that it surfaces on the heels of a similar announcement in New York City last month, where city officials and Chipotle entered into a $20 million agreement — the largest in the city’s history — to settle wage and hour violations affecting thousands of workers, as I described here.