The Last Brass Note

A story like this one is a minefield. Write about a plant closure in Ohio and you risk earning the ire of the government, which promised to protect exactly these jobs. Or the investor, who made a business decision and doesn’t appreciate being second-guessed by a stranger. Or the union, which fought hard and doesn’t need an outsider explaining what went wrong. Or even my own employer, which might prefer that its plant managers keep their opinions to themselves.

So why write it?

Because what if what I have to say stops everyone—government, capital, labor, management—and makes them think of another path? Not a path where one side wins and the others lose, but a path where a $6 million problem gets solved by the people closest to it, and a factory stays open, and 150 families keep their livelihoods, and the investor actually makes more money, not less?

That path exists. I’ve walked it. And the fact that nobody in Eastlake, Ohio, was ever given the chance to try it is what compels me to write.

I live in Wooster, Ohio. I run a manufacturing plant here. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s real work, done by real people who know things that can’t be Googled.

Two hours northeast of me, in Eastlake, Ohio, 150 workers at Conn Selmer just learned that their plant is closing. By June 30, the last American-made brass instrument factory will go silent. The tubas, sousaphones, and French horns that have been built on Curtis Boulevard for decades will now be made in China.

The company says the Eastlake plant lost $6 million in 2025. That’s the number that sealed the decision. And I have no reason to doubt it.

But here’s what I can’t stop thinking about from my plant in Wooster: What if that $6 million wasn’t a verdict? What if it was a solvable problem—and the people who could have solved it were the very workers who just got told to go home?

What Happened in Eastlake

On January 7, 2026, UAW Local 2359 sat down for what was supposed to be the first day of contract negotiations. Robert Hines, the local president, had spent the entire holiday season preparing his proposals. The union came ready to bargain.

Conn Selmer came ready to announce a funeral.

“They started off with a presentation of telling us how bad we were doing,” Hines told reporters. There would be no bargaining. The plant was closing. Professional French horn production would move to a non-union facility in Elkhart, Indiana. Everything else was going to China, where Conn Selmer had quietly established a production operation in 2024.

The workers say management had previously praised their productivity. Both things can be true simultaneously—the praise and the losses—when a company has never systematically asked its frontline workers to help fix the problems that leadership can see but can’t solve from a boardroom.

Former union president Joe Manni told reporters about the last time he met the company’s owner. He had one question: “Is your plan to keep this an American-made, American instrument company?” The answer was yes. “That’s all I needed to know,” Manni said. “And here we are today.”

The $6 Million Question Nobody Asked

Here’s what I know after 36 years of running factories on three continents: a $6 million annual loss in a 150-person plant is not a death sentence. It’s a diagnosis. And the treatment is almost always standing right in front of you, wearing safety glasses and steel-toed boots.

Six million dollars across 150 workers is $40,000 per employee. That’s the gap. In my experience, that gap is nearly always closeable—not through layoffs, not through wage cuts, not through offshoring—but through the systematic deployment of the intelligence that already exists on the factory floor.

Every manufacturing plant I’ve ever walked into has the same hidden reservoir. The line worker who knows exactly why the third station jams every Tuesday afternoon but has never been asked. The quality inspector who can hear when a bell flare is wrong before any instrument confirms it. The maintenance tech who rigged a fix for a chronic breakdown that engineering has been studying for six months. The veteran who trains every new hire and carries thirty years of process knowledge in her hands.

This intelligence is already there. It’s already paid for. It shows up every day, clocks in, and waits to be deployed. And in plant after plant, year after year, it never gets asked.

Instead, what happens is what happened in Eastlake. The losses mount. Leadership looks at the balance sheet. Labor appears as a cost—the single largest controllable cost. And the logic kicks in: if labor is a cost, and costs should be minimized, then the answer is to find cheaper labor. China. Vietnam. Mexico. Somewhere the number on the spreadsheet gets smaller.

But the number on the spreadsheet isn’t the whole story. It never is.

The Intelligence That Walks Out the Door

Conn Selmer’s own IPO prospectus, filed when its parent company Steinway Musical Instruments prepared to relist on the NYSE, contained this remarkable admission: “Many of the skills we require are not typically taught in traditional universities or schools. The process of bending the Steinway piano rim is an acquired skill and not widely taught. Similarly, the skills required to construct and repair our instruments are taught only in highly specialized trade schools or passed down from generation to generation.”

Read that again. The company itself acknowledged that its competitive advantage lives in the hands and minds of skilled workers whose knowledge is transmitted through apprenticeship and mentoring. And then it decided to eliminate those workers anyway.

This is the accounting error that haunts American manufacturing. Capital treats labor as a depreciating cost—something that loses value over time and should be replaced with something cheaper. But skilled manufacturing wo