Make Poughkeepsie Great Again

Can the U.S. hang on to its factories? Taylor Manufacturing is a case study in why the news is not all bad.

 

- William Baldwin

In the debate about whether the erosion of factory employment can be stemmed, you’ll find a glimmer of hope in a curious little outfit called the James L. Taylor Manufacturing Co. This business, which has been in Poughkeepsie, New York, for 106 years, makes clamps and other woodworking tools. The clamps are rather like the thing you’d use to glue the sides of a dresser drawer, but you won’t find them at Home Depot. They cost $15,000 and up.

Producers of furniture, flooring and cabinets, mostly on Taylor’s home continent, are the buyers. Taylor, then, is an American manufacturer selling to other American manufacturers. In a global economy you’d think it would be doubly cursed. But it’s thriving. It’s solidly profitable on sales of $12 million, says chief executive Michael Burdis. If you are mechanically adept he’d like to add you to his payroll of 37.

Make that triply cursed, New York being an especially poisonous locale for goods production. Since a peak 74 years ago, the state has seen 80% of its factory jobs melt away. In the same span the whole U.S. has lost 30%.

Taylor is alive because its specialized market, a few hundred tools a year, isn’t vulnerable to low-wage exporters. “If we were making 300,000 iPhones a month we couldn’t compete,” allows Bradley Quick, Taylor’s chief engineer. Poughkeepsie—the name refers to both a city 70 miles up the Hudson River and the surrounding town—has a glorious past. It was home to a dairy equipment factory with 764 workers. Fiat made cars here. The Smith Brothers churned out 30 tons of cough drops a day. Apparel manufacturing was big.