Apparently, it won’t play in Peoria

OK, that’s a lame post title; maybe I’ll come up with something wittier later.

But Caterpillar just announced that it is moving 300 top executives and support staff from Peoria to the Chicago area.  The local Journal Star reports that Caterpillar’s explanation is that this puts them closer to transportation networks:

“What we’re really after here in terms of the location is access to flights and the ability to get to markets more quickly,” [CEO Jim] Umpleby said. “One of the reasons we chose Chicago is it allows us that easier global access but it also is close to where we’re going to still have the majority of our people. We have more people here than any other location in the world.”

The Chicago Tribune adds a further explanation:  it’s easier to recruit talent to work in Chicago than in Peoria.  It reports,

Last year, Caterpillar opened an innovation-focused office in the Merchandise Mart that the company hoped would attract young, tech-savvy talent.Employees in the Merchandise Mart focus on digital marketing, analytics, digital development and other innovation projects.

And a local columnist gives this explanation:

Perhaps Caterpillar’s seventh floor is leaving Peoria for a more simple, personal reason, at least in part: Umpleby and other executives want to live somewhere else.

Granted, we are speculating. But after talks with plenty of well-connected people the past few days, we believe this theory deserves at least some consideration.

Umpleby is a Caterpillar veteran, with more than 30 years of service. But it appears little of that time has been spent at a Peoria base.

The Chicago-area native worked for Caterpillar all over the country and world, including Malaysia, San Diego and Singapore. How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Kuala Lumpur?

And, indeed, all the articles report that senior management has increasingly been coming from other industries, rather than working their way up the ranks or even coming from heavy-equipment companies.  As the daughter of a GM employee, I know well that there’s a deep suspicion of people coming from other companies, other industries, and thinking that all companies can be run with essentially the same management toolkit.  Dad was even skeptical of senior management that came from accounting rather than being a true “car guy.”  And — well, without naming my current or prior employers — I also harbor a suspicion of executives who come in and profess commitment to a company and make radical changes but can’t even be bothered to relocate.

I get that there are a lot of reasons why people prefer large cities.  It’s difficult to find high-skill jobs for both spouses in a small town, and what’s more, in a large city it’s much easier to job-hop without relocating.  You want your kids to go to a top-rated school, and you want them to have all the extracurricular options a large city affords, and you yourself want plenty of options in shopping, entertainment, and so on.  And if you’re wealthy, you want a social circle composed of people like you that you can find in the tony suburbs or wealthy urban enclaves of a big city.

And I get that in the year 2017 companies want to believe that they have the top talent in the world, not just the top talent in their local employment base.

But it’s still a concerning trend.  It’s a problem for the future of the U.S. for the country to consist of a small number of massively growing megalopolises, and a large number of shrinking, struggling smaller towns.

And it’s not just that.  Think about everything that’s been written about the growing divide between red states and blue states, rural and urban, the left-behind white working class and the elites, watchers of Duck Dynasty and whatever HBO show it is that snooty people watch these days.  And now consider how many corporations are physically separating their top executives from the rest of their employees.  Conagra and ADM are cited in the Tribune article, but they’re not alone.  Yes, you might say that top executives are already so far removed from the “little people” even when their offices were located in the same town anyway, so it doesn’t matter — but it does matter.  In the year 2017 it very much matters.

Image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3APeoria_-_Caterpillar_Administration_Building_from_Savings_Tower.jpg; By Roger Wollstadt from Sarasota, Florida [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons