About the Warehouse Sector Profile
The first part of this Warehouse Sector Profile will focus on the facts of the sector, as it exists in Canada today. We will define exactly what we mean when we talk about the “warehouse sector,” explore the role of the sector in the overall Canadian economy, highlight some major warehouse employers, and give a brief overview of unionization in the sector, including Unifor’s nation-wide presence.
Then we will provide an economic profile for the warehouse sector, including employment trends, a wage analysis, a brief look at investments in the sector, and a high-level look at corporate revenues and profits for some of the main players.
Next, we look at the geographic aspect of the warehouse sector, with a closer look at the provincial distribution of warehouses, and especially the rise of regional “clusters” of warehousing in Canada. Finally, the first part of our profile closes with a closer look at warehouse workers themselves, including their age, gender, race, ethnicity, immigration status, and spoken languages.
For the second part of this Warehouse Sector Profile, we brought together a small group of Unifor members who have decades of combined experience working in the warehouse sector. We asked them to share their thoughts on the challenges and issues they struggle with at work, and not surprisingly, they had a lot to say. In the final – and most important – section of our Profile, we lay out the key components of a warehouse sector strategy.