Editorial: Whatever United Airlines is planning, Chicago has to take charge now

Few industries are covered in such obsessive detail as aviation. Whether it’s the news-breaking X account @JonNYC, Dan Eleff’s DansDeals or Gary Leff’s smart, well-informed blog “View From the Wing,” every schedule change, union dispute or customer service issue is unearthed, dissected and debated. Traditional media rarely keep up.

So it went with the latest controversy surrounding United Airlines, which calls itself Chicago’s Hometown Airline and has thousands of employees in Willis Tower and Arlington Heights. United, it’s clear, is playing footsie with Denver, a city where it has both extensive current operations and a long history, given that Continental Airlines was headquartered there between 1937 and 1963. (Continental merged with United in 2010, a deal that followed the separate merger of Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines and was similarly bad for airline competition.)

We read Leff’s report Thursday, noting the careful choice of adjective uttered in public by United Chief Financial Officer Gerald Laderman when he told an aviation conference there were “no imminent (our italics) plans” to move United’s headquarters from Chicago to the Mile High City, a less than enthusiastic endorsement of a long-term Chicago future. By contrast, Crain’s Chicago Business initially reported that statement as “shooting down” any such move. Fair enough, but we tend to share Leff’s take that United’s Chicago HQ is at risk, notwithstanding that long-term lease in Willis Tower.

This wasn’t all about Laderman’s adjective, of course. Last summer, we read at the time, United spent $33 million to acquire 113 acres near Denver International Airport, strikingly convenient to both city and airport and along a rail line. When you develop land, you have to file a zoning request, inconveniently public as they tend to be. Other airline obsessives dug into the text of United’s request and found this statement: “United is actively investigating programmatic needs to support corporate campus activity accommodating 5,000 employees in future phases of the project.”

Five thousand employees! United does not even have that many in Willis Tower. That that sure sounds like an HQ, not merely a place to put flight simulators as United has suggested.

Corporate campuses are popular among airlines such as American, which has one by the Dallas Fort Worth airport. Of course, campuses can be vertical, too, as in Wills Tower, but those “future phases” of the Denver property development look like an ominous tell.

“Now I’m thinking it is a lock they are moving no matter what,” wrote the blogger Enilria, noting that the flashy Denver locale did not scream back-office operations. “The location is prime. They could still pull a Boeing and leave the sign on the door in Chicago, but all those jobs are moving I’d say.” (Boeing, you may recall, kinda took the sign on the door too).

It took a few days for local news outlets to catch up to the United issue. So far, United has stuck with its denial, or non-denial, depending on your point of view.

We’ve already said that in our view the city is deluding itself when it thinks it can simply hold the airlines feet to the flame over the massively costly Global Gateway program at O’Hare Airport. They know how to play hardball and can simply move their flights, and/or their headquarters, elsewhere. Negotiations with a view to cut capacity not yet needed and reducing overall costs are called for. Maintaining a United HQ here must be part of that.

We’re not confident that Brandon Johnson can make the city’s case effectively, but we’d like to see Gov. J.B. Pritzker do so on behalf of Illinois. After all, United also has a major impact on the suburbs.

That said, United also has an ethical obligation to let its “hometown” know its long-term plans for those 113 acres and 5,000 employees, a head count it presumably does not plan to add out of thin air. The cat is out of the bag, it seems. And, if this is all nonsense, what’s the deal, United? Let many of your best customers know.

We’d additionally note that the comments sections on some of these sites make depressing reading. Anonymous United employees can be read saying the bloom is off the rose of a downtown Willis Tower workplace, given the public safety issues in the Loop. And many commenters note the frosty relationship between business interests and the Johnson administration, making Denver more attractive.

This is one of the most egregious blind spots of our openly anti-capitalist administration: They have to compete for jobs and economic development with the likes of Denver, where such political sensibilities are not in control. And Seattle and Austin and, well, everywhere. That’s the simple reality they have not yet grasped.

We think our justly beloved Loop remains a great place to work, far better than Colorado farmland, but perception always threatens to become reality.

Pritzker and his people have to get on top of all of this before Chicago potentially loses one of its most important headquarters in a few years’ time.

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