There must be awful juju swirling over Deerfield. How else to explain the bad spell the village has been under of late?
In less than three months, Deerfield has lost nearly 3,000 jobs through no fault of its own. The last time a Lake County community began hemorrhaging jobs at this rate was Waukegan during the Rust Belt years of the 1980s.
That was when U.S. Steel closed the mammoth wire mill on the city’s South Side; Johns Manville shuttered its North Side lakefront asbestos plant, leaving a Superfund site in its wake; and Outboard Marine Corp. began shedding good union jobs. The city has stumbled to recover from those economic punches.
There’s plenty of office and research facilities, along with company headquarters, that still call Deerfield home, and it’s quite early to start a GoFundMe page. Yet, it must be unnerving to village officials and business boosters to wake up one morning and find thousands of jobs — of which hundreds of employees undoubtedly live in the village and nearby environs — soon will vanish. At least Waukegan slowly suffered the eradication of workers.
Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. announced last week it was pulling up its Lake County stakes and heading east to Boston, leaving its three-building, 777,000-square-foot U.S. headquarters complex off Lake Cook Road and the Tri-State Tollway empty of its 1,000 employees, according to a Chicago Tribune account.
Takeda came to Deerfield in 1998, after its 1977 joint venture with Abbott Laboratories, TAP Pharmaceutical, was dissolved. Takeda, Japan’s largest Big Pharma member, is in the process of acquiring Irish drugmaker Shire Plc. That acquisition has some opponents, according to last week’s report, which could derail the merger.
Ironically, Shire danced with North Chicago-based AbbVie a few years back in a potential merger that ended up going nowhere. Shire, too, has a county presence, with 400 jobs in next door Bannockburn, which essentially is Deerfield with larger lots and a smaller population. Those workers also could be affected by the Takeda-Shire merger.
The loss of Takeda comes on the heels of Walgreens transferring nearly 2,000 jobs to Chicago’s Old Post Office in June, although the company’s headquarters, in Deerfield since 1975, remains. The village lost Beam Suntory Inc. last year when the distiller moved its U.S. headquarters to the Merchandise Mart in Chicago’s River North.
Prior to that, Deerfield having the cachet of being home to the Chicago Bulls’ practice site disappeared when the Berto Center was moved to the big city and placed east of the United Center.
In the meantime, though, the village picked up the headquarters of snack-food giant Mondelez International with its 600 jobs along with heavy-equipment manufacturer Caterpillar Inc., which was Peoria’s loss, with 400 jobs.
In this latest round of corporate moves, Takeda says it will offer some employees the opportunity to move to Boston. If local workers take the company up on its relocation offers, that means a number of homes will be hitting the real estate market in south Lake County.
Deerfield Mayor Harriet Rosenthal told the Tribune officials are uncertain how many Takeda employees live in the village. She noted businesses surely will be losing revenue from those who shopped or dined in Deerfield.
While some may want to blame Takeda leaving Deerfield on the less-than-pro-business climate in Illinois, it appears the company’s move is more in tune with corporate needs than state policies — if that’s any consolation to Takeda workers having to make the life-changing choice of staying in high-tax Illinois or taking up residence in high-tax Massachusetts.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
