Another Large Company Announces Departure From Chicago

Tyson Foods announced last week that all employees in the Chicago area would be relocated, rendering the meat and poultry company one of multiple businesses to pull operations from the Windy City in recent months.

Beginning next year, Tyson staffers will relocate from Chicago and Dakota Dunes, South Dakota, toward the firm’s corporate headquarters in Springdale, Arkansas, which will receive upgrades designed to enhance worker creativity and collaboration.

“Bringing our talented corporate team members and businesses together under one roof unlocks greater opportunities to share perspectives and ideas, while also enabling us to act quickly to solve problems and provide the innovative products solutions that our customers deserve and value,” Tyson CEO Donnie King explained in a press release.

Tyson, which employs 137,000 people worldwide, is one of several noteworthy companies to leave the Chicago area this year. Construction machinery maker Caterpillar and airplane manufacturer Boeing are respectively moving to Irving, Texas, and Arlington, Virginia.

“We believe it’s in the best strategic interest of the company to make this move, which supports Caterpillar’s strategy for profitable growth as we help our customers build a better, more sustainable world,” Caterpillar CEO Jim Umpleby said in a statement.

According to a 2021 study from the Tax Foundation, the city of Chicago boasts the second-highest tax burden among large metropolitan areas in the United States, with residents paying a combined state and local tax rate of 10.25%. The organization’s index for state business taxes placed Illinois in the bottom quintile for corporate tax burdens in 2021. When lawmakers raised the Illinois corporate income tax rate from 7.3% to 9.5% in 2011, officials were forced to cut $235 million in deals to prevent Sears and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange from leaving the state.

The office of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (D) has nevertheless insisted that “countless companies” are staying in Chicago. “We will continue to welcome those businesses — including Kellogg, which just this week announced it is moving its largest headquarters to Illinois — and support emerging industries that are already creating good jobs and investing billions in Illinois, like data centers, electric vehicles and quantum computing,” a spokeswoman said earlier this year.

Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, the former richest man in Illinois, moved his hedge fund and much of his personal estate from Chicago to Florida several months ago while voicing concerns about the city’s lackluster business climate and rising violent crime. Citadel alone plans to invest as much as $1 billion in its new Miami headquarters, while Griffin has spent $175 million on property in southern Florida and $450 million on land for a new estate north of Palm Beach.

During a recent interview, Griffin indicated that a breaking point was the violent assault of two separate colleagues in the Windy City. The former was robbed after a person put “a gun to his head” during a coffee run, and another was attacked by “some random lunatic just trying to punch him in the head” while he was waiting for a car. Chicago recorded 797 homicides last year — more than any other American city.

A recent report from Redfin indicated that Chicago was among the most common origins of homebuyers moving to cities in Florida. The Sunshine State witnessed the nation’s largest net domestic migration between July 2020 and July 2021, with more than 220,000 people moving to the state, according to data from the Census Bureau.

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