Cummins Confidential : Disability:IN Deeper Dive - Pay-To-Play Inclusivity Scam and Disability Psyops

You want inclusion? Brilliant. You want accountability? Even better. What you get from the Disability:IN show is a gloss job, a crowd clapping along like seals and a very tidy invoice at the end. Pull back the curtain and you find a well-run membership machine that teaches firms how to look inclusive – and then sells them the certificate to prove it.

The stage – who runs the show?

Disability:IN is not a loose group of activists. It is a structured, corporate-facing non-profit that runs a global benchmarking tool – the Disability Equality Index – and a raft of programmes for companies that sign up as partners. They sell access to data, training, supplier directories, conference floors, and a sweet little thing called the Inclusion Awards. Corporations join as partners – they get programs, they pitch their progress, and they stand a chance to be celebrated on stage. Fine in theory – problematic in practice. The organisation’s own materials make plain that partners gain privileged access to tools, events and visibility.

Pay first – then play

Here’s the basic architecture: companies become partners – they buy access to the Index and other services – they submit their own documentation to be benchmarked – and from that pool Disability:IN draws award nominees and winners. The Inclusion Awards are explicitly populated from Disability:IN’s partner network. That means sponsorship and partnership status are the entry ticket to the party – not independent nomination by the people most affected by the outcomes. It smells like commercial incentive dressed up as civic virtue.

The mechanics that let a perfect score look like progress

The Disability Equality Index is framed as a rigorous benchmark. But it’s largely a self-reporting mechanism – firms fill out questionnaires about policies, practices and procedures, and those answers form the basis of the score. That system rewards paperwork – policy manuals, checklists, documented processes – more than actual lived experience in the workplace. If your HR files are immaculate, your score can be immaculate too. That is the literal gap between a polished policy deck and a worker who still can’t get a reasonable adjustment. And guess what? Cummins, perfect scorers no less, I’ve come to learn has a habit of tidying up HR files to suit. “Recreating” “lost” paperwork that happens to benefit them. Or to any sane person that wasn’t born yesterday, fabricating paperwork.

Premium reporting and paywalls – more layers, more opportunities to monetise good intent

Disability:IN offers different reporting tiers and paid insights for participating companies. Premium reporting and deeper analytic packages come at additional cost. Translation – the more a company pays, the more detailed its own benchmarking feedback becomes. Organisations that can afford premium access get more visibility into how they’re being judged and guidance on how to close gaps – a tidy commercial feedback loop that advantages deep-pocketed players. And after absorbing a $2 billion fine and barely blinking, it’s safe to say our inclusive disability crusaders at Cummins do indeed have deep pockets.

Awards drawn from the garden you water

The Inclusion Awards recognise winners from among Disability:IN’s corporate members. If your name isn’t in the garden, you don’t get a chance at the bloom. That’s not a conspiracy theory – that’s how corporate partner awards work when an NGO funds itself largely through partnerships, sponsorships and conference revenue. The structure creates a selection bias that favours the paying ecosystem. The optics are obvious – and toxic for credibility.

Critics are pointing at the lived-experience gap

It’s not just instinct or sourness from outsiders. Independent commentators and analysts have flagged the same mismatch – a proliferation of high scores and badges against a backdrop of persistent workplace problems and reporting gaps. The Index can show progress at the policy level while leaving day-to-day failures invisible. That matters because badges are used as reputational insurance – perfect for press releases, bad for anyone who expected real change to follow the confetti.

The Cummins connection – short and substantiated

A quick concrete example – big corporations that sit in the Disability:IN ecosystem use the Index and the awards in their comms. Cummins publicly touts top scores on the Disability Equality Index and has participated in Disability:IN events and partnership networks. That fact is on the record – companies use those seals of approval in annual reports, press releases and HR pitches. Whether those public-facing badges line up with every workplace experience is the exact question we should be asking. Multiple disability discrimination cases suggest that their disabled employees might not be working for disability champions after all. Who’d have thought? A disability psyop, just when you thought Cummins couldn’t sink much lower.

What “pay-to-play” looks like in practice

You buy partnership access – you get the tools and the forms.
You fill in the Index with your policies and evidence – often self-reported.
You get scored – you get a seal if you meet the criteria.
You use that seal as proof of inclusion – in recruitment, investor reports, and PR.

That loop sells reassurance to investors and marketing teams – and it sells consulting opportunities to firms that can help you “improve” your score. It is a tidy economy of reputational management – and the people it’s supposed to serve rarely get a seat at the table when the awards are being handed out.

Fixable problems – and why Disability:IN should care about them

If Disability:IN actually wants to swallow the scepticism, there are plain, implementable fixes that would cut the pay-to-play smell. Publish anonymised responses and scoring rubrics so auditors can test the index. Open an independent, non-partner nomination track for awards. Build employee-level metrics into the scoring – anonymous worker surveys, accommodation uptake rates, complaint resolution outcomes. Make premium insights optional but ensure core benchmarking and award eligibility are not gated by sponsorship tiers. Those moves would cost nothing for critics to understand, and everything for credibility.

Final thought – not a witch-hunt, but a demand for evidence

Disability:IN does real work – training, supplier registries, resources that some companies use to improve inclusive knowledge. Incorporating it into practice is another issue. What’s to stop sponsors paying just because they want the badge, even if it flies in the face of what they actually do? What checks and balances exist?

Legitimacy and dependence on corporate partnership are two sides of the same coin. If you run a non-profit on corporate money, you have to be more transparent than anyone else about how money maps to recognition. Otherwise you’re running a membership service with trophies – and that’s exactly the image critics are describing when they say pay-to-play. It’s a faux pas criticising a disability initiative, something that those running the show probably realise – and that’s why scrutiny has evaded Disability:IN. Until now.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Cummins Confidential : Disability:IN Deeper Dive – Pay-To-Play Inclusivity Scam and Disability Psyops