According to data from Poland’s Central Statistical Office (GUS), in 2024 the transport and warehousing sector employed more than 926,000 people in Poland. This makes it one of the country’s largest labor market segments, covering drivers, logistics operators, warehouse workers, sorting center staff, fulfillment employees and distribution personnel. At the same time, as industry analyses cited by Logistyczny.com and Grupa Progres indicate, the sector continues to struggle with thousands of vacancies, particularly in driver, warehouse and operational positions. In the fourth quarter of 2024 alone, approximately 9,600 positions remained unfilled within the sector.
The development of e-commerce has transformed logistics from a support function into one of the key pillars of the digital economy. Warehouses and logistics centers are no longer merely storage spaces – they have become highly intensive operational hubs where speed of order fulfillment, delivery reliability, seasonal flexibility and the ability to maintain continuous workflows are critical.
Next-day delivery models, same-day delivery, marketplace expansion and seasonal sales peaks mean that demand for people does not disappear, even despite technological investment. The problem is that demand for operational employees is growing faster than the domestic labor market can consistently meet.
A few years ago, labor shortages were often explained primarily by low unemployment. Today, the situation is more complex. Poland is facing several overlapping structural trends.
First – demographics. The declining number of people of working age is reducing the pool of potential candidates for physically demanding and shift-based jobs.
Second – changing professional aspirations. A growing proportion of Polish workers are less willing to accept jobs perceived as physically exhausting, repetitive, night-based or heavily dependent on irregular schedules. Warehousing, sorting centers and transport increasingly compete unsuccessfully with sectors offering more predictable hours or less physically demanding conditions.
Third – geography. Many logistics centers are being developed outside major metropolitan areas, where local labor pools may be limited and worker mobility often insufficient.
Fourth – turnover. In many cases, warehouse and logistics work is treated as transitional employment rather than a long-term career path, which increases recruitment costs and destabilizes operations.
Public debate about logistics often includes the argument that automation and AI will solve labor shortages. In practice, the situation is more complicated.
Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), warehouse robotics, automated sorting, predictive inventory systems and AI-driven route optimization genuinely improve efficiency. They help reduce errors, improve space management and automate some repetitive tasks.
However, technology currently supports human labor more than it fully replaces it. Order picking, packing, loading, unloading, managing seasonal spikes, quality control and road transport still require large numbers of operational workers. Even highly advanced warehouses remain dependent on human labor.
In transport, the limitations are even more significant. Professional drivers cannot be quickly replaced by autonomous vehicles, and the sector already suffers from serious shortages. According to industry analyses, Poland may currently be lacking approximately 120,000 drivers, and this deficit is expected to deepen as the workforce ages.
This is why foreign recruitment is becoming a necessity rather than simply an option for many companies. Over the past decade, Poland has undergone a major transformation – from an emigration country into one of the region’s largest labor destinations for migrants.
According to Polish Social Insurance Institution (ZUS) data cited by Portal TSL, the number of foreigners covered by social insurance increased from 184,200 in 2015 to nearly 1.193 million in December 2024 – more than a sixfold increase within a decade. At the same time, GUS reported that around 1.1 million foreigners were working in Poland in July 2025.
Although these figures cover the economy as a whole, industrial, logistics and transport sectors are consistently identified as some of the most important absorbers of foreign labor. Grupa Progres reports also indicated that manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, trade and transport are among the sectors of greatest interest for workers from Asia and Africa.
For years, the primary labor reservoir consisted of Ukraine and Belarus. However, war, migration shifts and competition from other EU countries have forced greater diversification. Increasingly, companies are analyzing recruitment potential from Central Asia, the Caucasus, Nepal, India and the Philippines. It is important, however, to remain precise – detailed sector-specific data regarding exact nationality shares within individual TSL segments remain limited, so it is more accurate to speak of diversification trends than definitive national dominance.
The mere existence of foreign candidates does not automatically solve labor shortages. One of the biggest barriers remains the length and unpredictability of visa and legalization processes.
For warehouses, this means staffing delays. For transport, the situation is even more complicated because, beyond work authorization, employers often face:
In practice, the period from recruitment to full operational readiness can extend over many months. For a sector dependent on speed and continuity, this creates a major strategic vulnerability.
The most realistic scenario for the coming years is not technology versus migration. It is coexistence.
Automation will improve productivity. AI will optimize planning. Robotics will reduce portions of repetitive labor. But without workers – especially operational staff and transport personnel – the sector will still struggle to maintain scale.
Poland’s warehouse, e-commerce and logistics sectors now operate in a reality where the local labor market increasingly fails to provide sufficient workforce supply, while technology does not eliminate the need for people.
This is why foreign recruitment is becoming one of the most important stabilization tools for the sector. Not because companies inherently prefer foreign workers over local ones, but because under current demographic conditions, the scale of digital economy expansion and the pace of logistics growth, they increasingly have no viable alternative.
The key question is therefore not only whether Poland needs foreign workers, but whether it will be able to build a system that can effectively and predictably recruit them in time – before sectoral growth begins to lose to labor shortages and bureaucracy.
