You learn things in a place like Cummins. About engines? A little. About people? About the smiles that show up when the diversity camera clicks, and the silence that follows when you’re too broken to stand by the machine.
Cummins calls itself a “values-driven” company. Diversity. Inclusion. Sustainability. The brochure’s heavy. The press releases flow like syrup. The reality’s a different flavour entirely.
Let’s start with the floor.
Not the C-suite with its podcast quotes and leadership webinars. The floor. The places where hands crack, backs ache, and the toilet’s a 90-second walk away, which is fine unless your bowels are a warzone and your mental health’s clinging on by its fingernails. I know this, because I lived it. They knew this, because I told them.
They offered support. The kind that photographs well. Maybe a nod to mental health awareness month, a flyer about counselling stapled to a staff noticeboard, a manager’s voice dropping half an octave to say “we understand” while HR quietly prepares the capability paperwork.
At Cummins, inclusion ends the moment you need it.
They fired me, eventually. Said I was insubordinate. That I’d refused to engage. That my tone was unprofessional. Never mind that it came after months of stress, after ignored evidence, after a grievance system with all the warmth of a detention cell. Refused OH? I was off sick under NHS care. They just needed a box ticked to move on with dismissal.
But this isn’t just about me.
Because while I was being quietly squeezed out with fit notes in my inbox and threats in my outbox, Jennifer Rumsey — CEO — was on stage somewhere, championing equal pay and inclusive leadership. You know the type: panel lighting, filtered livestream, a line about “breaking barriers” while the plant in Pune pays men four figures and calls it progress.
She earns more before lunch than some of them will see in five years.
DEI isn’t a belief system at Cummins. It’s a marketing tool.
A photoshoot. A disclaimer. A way to say “We’re trying” without doing a damn thing.
But diversity isn’t about them, is it? It’s about the optics. The boardroom balance. The front-page features showing two clean-scrubbed women next to a diesel engine they didn’t build. A post captioned “Meet the gamechangers” while the real engine room, the stress, the sickness, the silence, all gets filed away under “personnel matter.”
They’ll say I’m bitter. Maybe I am. But I’m also right. The metadata doesn’t lie. Neither does the £1.675 billion fine for cheating emissions. Neither does the internal scramble every time I file a new FOI or drop a thread that lands a little too close to the truth.
They wanted a quiet dismissal.
What they got was a man, a dog, and a blog, and the blog talks back.
So here it is: the illusion of inclusion.
It wears high heels and hashtags. It talks about mental health while threatening yours. It posts about fairness while firing the inconvenient. It calls itself sustainable while hiding diesel in the footnotes.
And it ends here, in writing. Because I kept the receipts.
Because “we care” should should mean more than a poster in the canteen.
Lee Thompson
Founder – tcap.blog