Hedge fund billionaire and one of Donald Trump’s earliest Wall Street backers, John Paulson, plans to offshore an Ohio manufacturing plant to China despite massive pushback from employees.
Workers at the plant called the move a “slap in our face,” after Paulson defended domestic manufacturing and fought to keep the plan open.
Conn Selmer, the largest US maker of brass and orchestral instruments, has told a union it plans to cut 150 jobs by the end of June 2026 and offshore much of the work at its East Lake, Ohio plant in China.
United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2359, which represents 150 employees, notified the workers of the closing last month when they sat down to bargain over their new union contract.
“We came in with a full proposal, fully prepared to bargain, and they started with a presentation of how bad we were doing,” said Robert Hines, president of UAW Local 2359 and an employee at the plant. The company said there will be no negotiations and the plant will be closed.
Workers say the offshoring is an attack on the union, citing rhetoric that the plant is unproductive despite previous praise from company management.
Union workers said Kahn Selmer opened a facility in China last year and gradually shifted their workloads to that plant, but workers were told the new facility would not affect workloads in Ohio.
“Almost immediately they started taking parts from some product lines,” Hines said. He noted that colleagues started complaining that the brass metal coming from China had to be removed due to poor quality.
Paulson made a significant portion of his fortune by betting against the housing market that collapsed in 2008. A longtime Trump donor, he served on Trump’s economic policy team during his first presidential campaign and raised $50.5 million for the president in April 2024 at his Palm Beach home.
Paulson, like Trump, has been an outspoken critic of offshoring. “We cannot have American producers closing American factories and offshoring. We must protect American jobs and protect American manufacturing,” he said in a September 2024 interview with CNBC.
Hines said offshoreing the brass plant was deeply objectionable to workers after Paulson painted himself as an advocate for domestic manufacturing.
“To go public on CNBC to support the Trump administration’s positive views on tariffs and all that stuff, and then you turn around and [say you] I want to send the work right to China,” Hines said. “It’s a slap in the face for us.”
But the union hopes to continue the fight. Hines said Trump would step in to stop the decision. “This decision can still be reversed,” he said.
In early February, the union held a rally in Eastlake, Ohio, as part of efforts to save the plant from closing. It also released a video of workers at the plant criticizing the proposal to close the plant.
“It makes me really angry,” one worker said in the video. “It leaves a hole in your heart,” said the second. “I feel betrayed,” added another.
“They told us that we are the heartbeat of this company,” one worker said in the video.
The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
A spokesman for Kahn Selmer would not comment on the criticism from the union, but the company confirmed that “if the interim decision is finalized,” it would transfer some tooling production offshore.
The company said the plant closures will “enhance our competitiveness and better meet today’s market demands”. “We are deeply committed to US manufacturing as we have been for more than 150 years.”
Workers are particularly concerned about the impact of plant closures on the community.
“It’s going to take a lot of money out of East Lake,” Hines said. “We got people to come out [and] Show love to try to keep the place open and the company is not open to it. They are not answering or returning anyone’s calls.
