Council Gives Initial Approval to Tax Breaks for Milwaukee Tools HQ
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The business of luring a corporate headquarters is most often a matter of offering the right incentives: affiliates, assessment ratios, fee agreements, credits, parcels, payrolls and square footage. The county wants the name on the building, the executives in the offices, the engineers in the labs and the tax base that comes with an employer deciding that this is where it belongs.
On first reading, Anderson County Council voted Tuesday to extend affiliate tax incentives to Milwaukee Electric Tool Corp. in connection with the location of its headquarters. The incentives would give Milwaukee Tool the same 2 percent tax reduction already granted to Techtronic Industries, or TTI, its parent company.
TTI acquired Milwaukee Tool from Atlas Copco in 2005 for $626.6 million. The parent company, based in Hong Kong, makes power tools and outdoor products under names that have become fixtures in garages, workshops and job sites: Ryobi, Milwaukee and Hoover.
In Anderson County, however, TTI is a significant economic presence, employing more than 1,500 people at its global innovation center which has become one of the county’s largest and most visible industrial operations.
“The partnership between Anderson County and TTI/Ryobi has been constantly growing and beneficial to the citizens of Anderson County,” said Anderson County Administrator Rusty Burns. “This is another wonderful addition and we welcome Milwaukee to our community.
Since 2019, TTI has invested more than $500 million, including a $100 million expansion in 2020 adding a 1 million-square-foot manufacturing plant and 525 projected jobs to the company’s Innovation Way campus.
The local scale is considerable. TTI’s Anderson footprint includes more than 500,000 square feet of office, engineering and testing space, along with 3 million square feet of distribution and warehouse operations. The incentive extension would fold Milwaukee Electric Tool into the same local economic-development structure already available to TTI.
The vote does not change the physical reality of the campus. The buildings are already there, the warehouses already move products, engineers already design, test and revise tools built for people whose work depends on a battery, a blade, a motor or a drill bit behaving exactly as promised. But headquarters matter because they can place a company’s center of gravity closer to the place where its work is increasingly done.
Milwaukee Tool’s history began with a piece of machinery that would seem almost quaint beside the battery-powered tools of today: the Hole-Shooter.
In 1924, the company commercialized a five-pound, one-handed electric drill capable of drilling quarter-inch holes. The device was engineered to replace heavy two-person machinery used on industrial assembly lines. It was a small machine with a large implication: electrical power could be made portable, and a tool could be light enough for one person to carry without losing its industrial usefulness.
The Hole-Shooter helped establish early standards for portable electric motor design. It anticipated a century of tool development built around an uncomplicated promise: make the machine smaller, stronger, safer and more useful to the person holding it.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Milwaukee expanded into heavy-duty electric tools for construction and defense manufacturing. In 1935, it introduced a three-quarter-inch electric hammer drill designed to drive anchors into concrete. In 1949, company engineers added spring clutches to circular saws and sanders to reduce recoil — an important acknowledgment that power, without control, can become its own hazard.
That same year, Milwaukee introduced a half-inch right-angle drill designed for electricians and plumbers working inside tight wall cavities. The tool was built for a specific physical problem: there are places in a building where a person must work at an angle, with little room to move, and where an ordinary drill becomes too large to be useful.
The company’s history is filled with such adjustments. The best tool innovations often do not announce new worlds, instead they solve old frustrations that tradespeople have learned to accept.
Milwaukee’s most consequential mechanical breakthrough arrived in 1951 with the Sawzall, described as the industry’s first portable electric reciprocating saw.
The tool used a three-piece mechanical drive to convert the motor’s rotary motion into a linear cutting stroke. In technical terms, it was a compact system of movement and force, practically replacing the hacksaw.
A worker no longer had to stand over a cut and push steel teeth back and forth by hand. The Sawzall did the repetitive work through the action of an electric motor, turning a difficult manual task into something faster and more portable.
The name became so embedded in construction culture that it often functions as a generic term, even when the tool in question was made by someone else, a rare accomplishment for an industrial product.
In the 1970s, Milwaukee developed the Hole-Hawg, a high-torque right-angle drill designed to pull large wood augers through studs and joists without stalling, and later introduced the half-inch Magnum Hole-Shooter pistol drill and became the first American manufacturer to produce a four-and-a-half-inch electric angle grinder.
Each tool belonged to the working logic of construction, to make the opening, cut the material, pull the wire, set the anchor, grind the edge, move on to the next problem.
The early 2000s brought a shift that would eventually change the basic appearance of the jobsite. Milwaukee and its competitors began moving from corded electric motors to cordless systems capable of delivering serious power.
In 2005, the same year TTI bought Milwaukee Tool, the company introduced lithium-ion battery packs for heavy-duty power tools through its 28-volt system. Milwaukee was the first manufacturer to do so, helping initiate an industrywide transition away from nickel-cadmium batteries.
The change was more than chemical. A corded tool carries a requirement with it, an outlet, an extension cord, a generator or a limited distance from power. A high-output cordless tool changes the geography of work. It can travel up a ladder, through an unfinished building, into a field, around a vehicle or across a jobsite without dragging its source of electricity behind it.
Milwaukee’s modern M18 and M12 Fuel platforms are built around that transformation. They combine brushless motors, high-capacity battery cells and electronic microprocessors that monitor motor temperature and power draw. In the older tool world, a worker listened to the strain in a motor. In the newer one, the tool listens to itself.
The company has extended that logic into heavier equipment through its MX Fuel platform, which uses high-voltage motors and battery systems to replace gasoline engines in concrete cut-off saws, core drills and demolition hammers.
The power tool has become a mobile electrical system with motor, processor, battery and software packed into something that still must survive dust, vibration, falls, rain, heat and the impatience of a worker trying to finish before dark.
Anderson County Council’s first-reading vote is a vote to recognize that Milwaukee Tool’s future is tied to a place that has already become central to TTI’s growth.
The incentives would extend a 2 percent reduction already available to TTI to Milwaukee Electric Tool Corp. The arrangement now requires two more votes in the process, where the usual questions will remain: What does the county receive? What commitments does the company make? How much does the incentive cost in the short term, and what does it produce over the life of the agreement?
Those questions are inseparable from modern economic development. Counties compete for companies while companies compare locations, infrastructure, workforces, taxes, transportation systems and incentives. The negotiations can seem abstract until they become visible in a manufacturing plant, an engineering lab, a warehouse or a payroll.
For Anderson County, Milwaukee Tool’s headquarters would represent another layer of permanence for an employer that already occupies millions of square feet and employs more than 1,500 people. It would bring the corporate identity of a company known for a century of portable tools closer to the place where its parent company has built one of its most substantial American operations.
The Hole-Shooter began with a five-pound drill built to give one worker the power once reserved for two. A century later, the company that made it is part of a global manufacturing system with headquarters decisions measured in incentives, square footage and hundreds of jobs.
But the underlying idea is unchanged. Somewhere, a person is standing inside a wall cavity, on a scaffold, beside a concrete slab or at the edge of an unfinished building, waiting for a tool to do what it was built to do.
