Late last week, Tyson Foods announced that it would be taking all of its employees from the Chicago area and relocating them, adding the massive meat and poultry titan to the growing list of businesses to cancel all of its operations within the Windy City over the past few months.
As of the first of the coming year, Tyson staffers are going to start relocating out of Chicago and Dakota Dunes, South Dakota, in an effort to move much closer to the corporate headquarters of the company located in Springdale, Arkansas, which will see a series of upgrades designated to enhance the collaboration and creativity of its workers.
“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,” expressed Tyson CEO Donnie King via a press release.
Employing well over 137,000 people worldwide, Tyson is just one of a growing list of several major companies to depart from the Chicago area over the course of the year. Construction machinery maker Caterpillar and airplane manufacturer Boeing are respectively slated to move out 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,” explained Jim Umpleby, the CEO of Caterpillar, via a released statement.
As reported in a study from 2021 coming from the Tax Foundation, the city of Chicago sports the overall second-highest tax burden among bigger metropolitan areas throughout the United States, with its citizens being afflicted with a combined local and state tax rate of roughly 10.25%. The group’s index for state business taxes put Illinois squarely in the bottom quintile in 2021 for corporate tax burdens. When legislators spiked the corporate income tax rate for Illinois from roughly 7.3% to 9.5% in 2011, officials were made to drop over $235 million in various deals to stop Sears and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange from ditching the state.
The office of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (D) has since tried to insist that “countless companies” are choosing to stay in the city. “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,” expressed one spokeswoman earlier this year.
A recent report from Redfin solidly indicated that when looking at homebuyers moving down to Florida, Chicago was among the most common origins. The sunshine state saw the largest domestic migration in the country from July 2020 to July 2021, with well over 220,000 people moving into the state, as reported by data gathered from the Census Bureau.
