Oversized crowbars bend wooden for a piano’s rim. Circular sanders clean tough edges on expensive Sitka spruce soundboards. Hammers and chisels notch a bridge to permit piano strings to vibrate freely.
For 30 years, Bernard Craddock has been one of the roughly 200 staff handcrafting pianos at the 150-year-old Steinway & Sons manufacturing facility in Astoria, a neighborhood in the New York borough of Queens.
“Everybody has a specific job here,” Craddock mentioned, engaged on a piano body. “My job is to set this straight for the hammers to hit the strings.”
President Donald Trump has vowed to begin an American manufacturing renaissance, one of the predominant goals of his commerce conflict. But manufacturing isn’t straightforward anyplace in the United States because of excessive prices, strict laws and lack of staff with the vital abilities.
Steinway & Sons, nevertheless, is a uncommon brilliant spot in US manufacturing. A company that thrives as a result of it doesn’t mass produce its product. Instead, it makes use of a small workforce of expert craftsmen to supply a premium merchandise — world-class pianos.
“They have this storied, legacy brand,” mentioned Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “They can charge a premium for that, but they also are serving higher market segments that can afford to pay those premium prices and need to because they’re performing on pianos at the highest levels.”
Most US producers are pressured to compete on value, which has turn into harder as Trump’s tariffs, particularly on key inputs like metal, aluminum and copper, have raised costs.
But by making pianos many contemplate the finest in the world, Steinway can cost excessive sufficient costs to maintain its US-based operation up and working. A Steinway grand piano can be priced as little as $90,000 or as a lot as $200,000.
“I think we are the largest manufacturer remaining in New York City, we’re very proud of that. It’s not easy to continue to manufacture in New York,” Steinway & Sons CEO Ben Steiner advised NCS.
Steiner mentioned his company thrives as a result of it focuses on high quality merchandise.
“There’s no other way with the cost structure that we have to operate in New York City, or even operating in the United States or in Europe,” he added. “Unless you’re focused on quality and innovation, you’re not going to survive.”
Despite the said purpose of reshoring manufacturing jobs, Trump’s tariffs on most US imports might be having the opposite effect.
The US shed one other 12,000 manufacutring jobs in August, the newest information obtainable, for the fourth month in a row. Roughly 42,000 jobs have been misplaced since April.
Hersh mentioned Trump’s chaotic commerce agenda is performing as a roadblock to manufacturing facility hiring.
“Businesses don’t like (tariffs), but they can adjust to a reasonable tariff,” Hersh mentioned. “(Trump has) created uncertainty for the economy that just has businesses sitting on their hands, not being able to make decisions about investment or to hire new workers.”
The White House advised NCS that the purpose of Trump’s coverage is to make sure home producers are in a position to supply every little thing the want in the US, from inputs to staff.
“America cannot just be an assembler of foreign-made parts. The Trump administration is taking a nuanced, multi-faceted approach to reshore every step of the manufacturing that’s critical to our national and economic security,” mentioned White House spokesman Kush Desai. “There is no shortage of American hands and minds to build America’s next industrial Golden Age.”
But American manufacturing appears very completely different from 5 many years in the past, when thousands and thousands of staff had been employed to carry out particular duties alongside meeting strains. After commerce agreements flourished in the Nineties, many of these jobs moved overseas.
And in right this moment’s age of automation and synthetic intelligence, manufacturing facility flooring are more and more stuffed with robots. That means US factories require fewer staff with specialised abilities.
Like at Steinway, the place making pianos appropriate for the world’s finest live performance halls isn’t a fast course of. Building a piano takes Steinway’s expert craftsmen 11 months from begin to end. On common, staff full solely 4 or 5 pianos a day.
And as a result of the piano’s many parts are domestically sourced, Steiner mentioned tariffs haven’t impacted them considerably.
“There’s minor impacts in certain materials, but because we manufacture in the United States, it’s not a major issue for us,” he mentioned.
Maintaining a constant workforce
While top-of-the-line pricing and home sourcing can resolve a lot of issues for Steinway, it will possibly’t resolve all of them.
One of the greatest challenges dealing with the piano maker is a potential scarcity of Sitka spruce lumber, which Steiner mentioned makes the easiest devices.
“For the Sitka spruce, we find that the best in the world comes from a particular part of Alaska where there’s a very short growing season,” he mentioned. “As a consequence, the trees grow very slowly.”
And Steinway wants to verify one different element is in good provide: expert staff.
The manufacturing facility in Astoria has been in nearly steady operation since 1873, with solely momentary pauses in piano manufacturing throughout the Great Depression and World War II. During that point, the company produced glider components for the conflict effort.
“It not only kept the lights on, so to speak, but it kept some of the valued craftspeople around,” mentioned Anthony Gilroy, Steinway’s Vice President for Marketing and Communications. “The Steinways were smart enough to know that after the war you’d get a lot of people coming back willing to work but without the skills to build pianos, and you needed these old timers, if you will, here in the factory to train the next generation of piano makers.”
That’s half of the purpose Steinway & Sons has by no means thought-about relocating out of New York City. It’s these extremely particular jobs – carried out by “old timers” like 30-year craftsman Craddock in the body meeting division – why Steinway retains calling Astoria residence.
“The skills that they have, you can’t replicate it. You can’t just open up a factory somewhere else and have those skills,” mentioned Steiner. “So long as our craftspeople are here I can’t think of any reason why they wouldn’t be, then we’ll still be making our pianos here.”