Posted on 08/18/2015 5:16:11 PM PDT by george76
From Allstate, CME Group and McDonald's to Motorola Mobility and Walgreens Boots Alliance, it's hard to think of a big company in metro Chicago that's not cutting head office staff.
Corporate headquarters operations that created good jobs for generations of Chicagoans have turned into drivers of unemployment in recent years. Total headcount at Chicago's 10 biggest companies fell 5.6 percent last year. And data from Chicago outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas show big, locally based companies contributing an outsized share of nearly 90,000 layoffs in Illinois since 2013.
Kraft Heinz joined the parade on Aug. 12, cutting 700 of its 1,900 employees in Northfield before moving the remaining headquarters staff to downtown Chicago. Motorola Mobility followed the next day, wiping out 500 jobs, or 25 percent of its city workforce.
Related: Walgreens lays off 270 local corporate employees in streamlining move.
It's a troubling turn of events for a region that sells itself as an ideal base for global companies. The strategy worked well for decades, as Chicago's central location and transportation connections helped spawn giants in industries such as consumer packaged goods, finance, manufacturing and retailing.
Even after many factory jobs were sent to low-cost locales, company headquarters kept hiring well-paid managers and professionals. Accountants and product managers, IT supervisors and in-house lawyers earned salaries that funded mortgage payments, orthodontist bills and college tuition.
Now those jobs are going away as corporate Chicago finds itself on the wrong side of three big trends roiling the economy: slow growth in mature industries, the rise of activist investors, and a new business philosophy of attacking corporate overhead, aka staff jobs.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagobusiness.com ...
Excellent graphic. Thank you.
No. The giant sucking sound is the massive, unsustainable, obscenely large pension payments for teachers and other government workers that stupid, greedy, vote-hungry and criminally indifferent city legislators voted in year after year.
I saw how my Fortune 500 company could increase productivity with software we already owned but were under using. (My boss said, “you’ll be the first one I lay off.”) Many jobs were done by people that could have been done with the press of a button. As more companies introduce enterprise resource programs the number of needed staff will continue to drop. Those companies that fail to do this will be eaten by the leaner companies. I suspect that technology is the biggest unemployment driver, aided by labor laws that make it necessary to eliminate as many jobs as possible.
Dang —if it’s not one thing it’s another!
Exactly. Cook County is so corrupt.
How is Boeing’s Chitown staff doing?
> I suspect that technology is the biggest unemployment driver
Nah, let’s call it “lack of ability to adapt to changing conditions”
Sounds like a large scale version of SCETV here.
Years ago when I was there we filled out handwritten timesheets. My handwriting is on par with the typical epileptic chicken and the poor HR lady would call me two or three times to clarify stuff.
A friend of mine made an excel template of the time sheet and when printed looked good enough to fool the HR. Even the catbert thought it was a good idea.
My friend was not an excel guru and neither was I but I did the simple formulas. There were a few approved test runs. Figured it would be accepted and things would be better. It wasn’t a glory thing, just make life a little better.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and I hear from my friend since I was out a few days. He got an angry threatening memo from catbert and I had the same waiting on me.
The gist of it was my friends supervisor (the little redhead harridan) took it upon herself to announce agency wide that it was for everyone. She got none of the blame somehow especially since it was her that sent the announcement and didn’t offer to say a word on our behalf. Why catbert chewed us, I could never get an answer for. Needless to say it died.
People liked what we made and were disappointed to see it die.
I finally left. My friend is still there close to retirement. The little redhaired harridan was fired a few years later for who know what. It depended on who you asked. No sympathy from me.
What happened to Wyatt's Torch? : (
That certainly is what is driving companies and taxpayers out of NJ: the cost of government workers (especially teachers).
While technology plays a huge role, outsourcing to Asia is big; besides sending jobs there, we are importing them here. I see a huge increase in the number of Asians in the financial sector, every one of them stealing an American job. They are less needed in finance than in tech (which is hardly at all); many Americans did these jobs for decades, but for better wages.
How much longer can this be sustained?
Some of those are on welfare, unemployment, SS Disability, or just work off the books.
Millions more are retired (living on pensions, earnings, Social Secuity, etc). "Retired" is a concept that did not exist for humanity until recent times.
The right of a "retirement" for millions of people to play lots of golf, travel, shop, and eat out 4 times a week may someday be a thing of the past.
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