32 | FORBES ASIA MAY 2017
PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRANCO VOGT FOR FORBES
I
n the debate about whether the erosion of factory em-
ployment can be stemmed, you’ll find a glimmer of hope
in a curious little outfit called the James L. Taylor Man-
ufacturing Co. This business, which has been in Pough-
keepsie, 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 manufac-
turers. 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 poi-
sonous 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 work-
ers. Fiat made cars here. The Smith Brothers churned out 30
tons of cough drops a day. Apparel manufacturing was big.
The dairy-equipment people found better locales for their
manufacturing. Fiat’s assembly line has become a strip mall.
The Smith family hung on for five generations, then sold out to
BY WILLIAM BALDWIN
Can the U.S. hang on to its factories? Taylor Manufacturing
is a case study in why the news is not all bad.
Make
Poughkeepsie
Great Again
FORBES ASIA
MANUFACTURING
