Tyson Foods said it will close three offices: one in downtown Chicago, one in Downers Grove, Illinois, and one in Dakota Dunes, South Dakota.
The move is part of a plan to bring all of the employees back to the Arkansas headquarters.
This is the fourth big company that wants to leave Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago. Boeing, Caterpillar, and Citadel are the others.
Between the three locations, there are about 1,000 people who work.
Tyson CEO Donnie King said in a statement about the decision that the move will start early next year.
King said, “Bringing our talented corporate team members and businesses under one roof gives us more chances to share perspectives and ideas. It also lets us act quickly to solve problems and give our customers the innovative products and solutions they want and need.”
McDonald’s, which is based in Chicago, has said that the city is too dangerous. CEO Chris Kempczinski recently said that crime “seeps into every corner of our city.” He said that people often ask him, “What’s happening in Chicago?”
He said at the Economic Club of Chicago, “We have violent crime in our restaurants… we’re seeing homelessness issues in our restaurants.
We have people overdosing on drugs in our restaurants. So, every day in our restaurants, we see what’s going on in the world at large.”
McDonald’s has said it will stay in Chicago, but companies like Boeing, Caterpillar, and Citadel have said they will move. These people have said they want to leave Chicago in recent months. This is almost three years after the city’s crime wave began.
Ken Griffin, the founder of Citadel and the wealthiest person in Chicago, has spent a record $106.9 million on a waterfront estate. This comes after he said he would move more than 1,000 of his employees from the dangerous city of Chicago to the safer city of Miami.
In May, Boeing said it was leaving Chicago and moving to Washington, DC. But the company didn’t say that it was because of cri.me.
Analysts say that this move shows that it no longer wants to be seen as a commercial airliner and instead wants to be seen as a defense and aerospace contractor. Boeing was based in Seattle from 1916 to 2001.
Caterpillar, a company that makes construction equipment, is also moving its offices from Deerfield, a suburb, to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Kellogg, on the other hand, said in June that its new cereal and plant-based food companies would be based in Chicago.
Because of inflation, it was a hard year for Tyson. It recently said, “Demand for chicken is very strong,” but demand for its more expensive cuts of beef has been going down.
Since the pandemic, both parties have complained about the “lawlessness” of the city. This is because Lightfoot pushed for the 700-page Safe, Accountable, Fair, and Equitable Today Act, which changed the criminal justice system in Illinois in a number of ways, including ending bail posting in January.
According to data from the Chicago Police Department, the number of murders has gone up by 32% this year, from 319 last year to 425 so far. This is before the pandemic caused a rise in crime in the city.
In 2021, there were 519 murders in the city. This was the highest number of murders since the middle of the 1990s, or a quarter-century high.
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