Cat Tracks to Chicago

Caterpillar, Inc. became the latest corporate giant to join the back-to-the-city movement when it announced, on January 31, that it was scrapping plans to build a new headquarters building in Peoria and instead would relocate its headquarters to the Chicago area. Caterpillar has been headquartered in Peoria since 1925.

The company announced that it would be relocating a limited group of senior executives and support functions to the Chicago area. The company disclosed only that the executives would be moving into leased office space by the end of 2017, but did not specifically state that the space would be in downtown Chicago. The company expects about 300 HQ employees to staff the new offices, some of whom would be relocated from Peoria.

The firm’s CEO, Jim Umpleby, provided an interesting rationale for the relocation: “Caterpillar’s Board of Directors has been discussing the benefits of a more accessible, strategic location for some time. Since 2012, about two-thirds of Caterpillar’s sales and revenues have come from outside the United States.  Locating our headquarters closer to a global transportation hub, such as Chicago, means we can meet with our global customers, dealers and employees more easily and frequently.”

Although there are surely additional reasons for the move, Umpleby’s statement is right out of Irwin and Kasarda’s classic paper on air passenger linkages and metropolitan employment growth. Peoria is about 165 miles southwest of Chicago in central Illinois. Unlike Chicago’s O’Hare, Peoria’s General Wayne A. Downing International Airport does not offer nonstop flights to, say, London, Shanghai or Beijing.

Caterpillar’s decision also underscores the complexity of modern global business organization, which defies President Trump’s simplistic approach to trade and protectionism. The firm has 22 “principal” manufacturing facilities in the U.S., but also has plants in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Thailand. The firm had 40,900 U.S. employees at year-end 2016, and another 54,500 abroad, including 11,400 in Latin America and 22,800 in Asia/Pacific.

The move also adds a ripple to the narrative of Midwestern industrial belt decline. In this case, the jobs are being lost to a global U.S. city rather than to a foreign country.  Caterpillar employs about 12,000 workers in the Peoria area (in a metropolitan labor market of about 175,000 payroll employees) so its footprint there will remain large. However, it is difficult to believe that this is not a continuance of a long-term shift of the firm’s higher-level executive functions to global locations with a higher level of connectivity and a richer pool of human capital.

 

The New Trumpian Landscape

When I created this site, the policy landscape for urban America seemed fairly predictable– continued divided national government, with a centrist Democrat in the White House and a Republican majority in the House and probably the Senate. That alignment would provide, as it has in the recent past, opportunities for incremental improvements in the quality of urban life and some hope for reversing the mounting inequalities that threaten America’s economic and social stability.

The 2016 election upset that projection, to say the least, and I have followed very closely the staffing and emerging governing philosophy of the Trump Administration. Putting aside the thousands of subplots and and nth-order considerations, I believe you’re left with two basic conditions that define the new landscape:

  1. America’s now has a President who is profoundly ignorant and has serious personality disorders, and;
  2. He will enable right-wing extremists to pursue a reactionary domestic legislative agenda and belligerent foreign policy goals unimpeded.

The first of those realities was obvious to many, maybe even a majority, of Americans before the election and has only become more obvious since. I think that as the country gets to know him better we will only become more astonished at the vastness of his ignorance and the severity of his personality flaws. Being a New Yorker I have been exposed to a constant dribble of Donald Trump for most of my life, and I have never seen him do or say anything that contradicted my basic assessment of his character. That he didn’t know who Frederick Douglas is, or was, comes as absolutely no surprise. Perhaps his ignorance results from having Adult ADHD, I cannot say, but there is plenty of circumstantial and testimonial evidence that he has read few if any books in his adult life.

Continue reading “The New Trumpian Landscape”