The Inland Empire consistently ranks among the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. Citrus farming drove the area’s nineteenth century economic development, while heavy manufacturing and military bases sustained the region’s economy during the Cold War era.

The warehousing industry absorbed land along Interstate 10 (the “San Bernardino Freeway” going from Los Angeles to San Bernardino) beginning in the 1970s and 1980s and accelerating around the time of the housing market downturn in 2008. The combination of major highway access, railways, cheap land, and proximity to the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports made the Inland Empire an ideal landing place for logistics firms who sought to capitalize on increased flows of goods from Asian and Latin American countries.

Local governments eager to promote new jobs also offered various incentives to warehouse developers, in contrast to community opposition to higher-density warehouse construction in open-space areas of Los Angeles and Orange County.

Warehouse construction then continued eastward throughout the 1990s and 2000s, partially due to labor availability in Black and Latino communities that were decimated by military base closures and declines in construction jobs following the housing foreclosure crisis.

For reference, Amazon—which only began opening warehouses in California around 2012—now operates 14 facilities in the region and has become the area’s largest employer with at least 40,000 employees. 

From 2010 to 2019, the logistics sector accounted for 26.2 percent of the region’s new jobs. BLS data indicate that these are largely entry level-jobs such as stockers, order fillers, and material movers. These figures do not include a substantial number of temporary laborers—many of whom bounce between warehouses, customer service positions, and the remaining agricultural jobs. Temporary workers accounted for about 60 percent of all warehouse workers in 2013, leading to the temporary staffing industry growing 575 percent between 1990 and 2007. Each of these sets of jobs pays somewhere around the minimum wage. The growth in temporary employment coincided with the rapid growth of the warehousing industry, indicating the industry’s dependence on on-demand staffing. Temporary labor arrangements exacerbate occupational polarization because job tasks are designed to be learned in a day or less (i.e., skill-building is unlikely to occur when working in a job designed to be temporary).