Every business I can think of that has a “headquarters” separate from their largest employee pool seems to be in decline… GE, Boeing being big obvious examples. It seems like moving the executives away from the day to day work is a sign the business doesn’t care about itself anymore. I’m curious if there are any other examples, or any counter examples to this.
The only benefit given by the state in exchange for “headquarters” is employing a certain number of people at a certain income. But if all your payroll stays somewhere else, then what could possibly be the incentive for tax breaks?
"To secure the latest corporate retention project, the State of Louisiana offered CenturyLink a competitive incentive package that includes an annual performance-based grant, subject to company payroll performance. In addition, the agreement creates funding for information technology faculty, curricula and education at Louisiana Tech University, where the state has supported the Clarke M. Williams Professorship in Telecommunications in honor of the company’s founder."
https://news.lumen.com/2019-04-02-Gov-Edwards-And-Centurylin...
> subject to company payroll performance.
Exxon is another example I can think of. Until recently, their HQ was in a tiny building in Irving, TX while the majority of their workforce was elsewhere.
There's also a whole slew of companies that have a lot of employees "in the field" that are separate from their corporate workforce and would inherently be HQed in locations other than where their large employee bases are, eg manufacturing companies, Intel, car manufacturers, Walmart, UPS, several airlines, banks... Even Boeing would fall into this category. I'm not sure how those factor into things.
The irony which sometimes happens is that those who work for Xerox (or Kodak, who has been doing the same demise, just on a grander and faster schedule) end up working for a contracting firm and then get "rehired" back to do the same job they used to do, just now not as an employee of Xerox. I'm not convinced this saves Xerox any actual money but it must work out to their benefit somehow as TONS of people doing work for Xerox are not Xerox employees but used to be.