Willy Workhorse is back. Cummins’ perfect people-story prop. The man who brushes charity dogs, smiles through EEEC, and recovers from a mental health crash by filling in the right forms on time.
This time he has made it. He is getting a full Life At The Company feature – the glossy Cummins.com treatment. A diverse workplace. A caring employer. A mental health hero in hi-vis. Unbeknown to Willy, it’s all mapped out. He feels down, gets help (Cummins aided, of course), takes a linear recovery and lives happily ever after.
Shame nobody told Dennis.
Previously On Willy – Dogs, Forms, And Feelings Off The Clock
Quick recap.
Willy posed for the EEEC community support day – brushing rescue dogs’ teeth for the cameras, the Northern Echo circling like a house-trained PR drone, Dogs Trust logos everywhere. Cummins doing kindness. Willy doing what he always does – turning up, doing the graft, letting other people take the credit.
Then Dennis – the nervous little rescue dog drafted in as a prop for the great corporate compassion parade – landed in Dogs Trust ICU after it all went wrong. The tailpipe of Willy’s Dodge Ram is a suspect, but it was swept under the carpet before an autopsy could take place.
Since then Willy has been low. Not sick-note low. Not officially. Just that quiet, heavy version of low you only admit to your kettle and your bathroom mirror. The EEEC day is being repackaged as a success. Dennis is in a crate surrounded by machines. Willy is on the SAL staircase after daring to be human.
Perfect time for a people-story.
Life At The Company – Diversity By Camera Angle
Today is makeup day.
Willy is in a side room at the plant with a folding chair, a ring light, and an agency make-up artist who swears she normally does proper work. His hi-vis has been swapped for a clean polo. Somebody has ironed his lanyard.
The brief is simple.
Life At The Company wants to showcase inclusion. Different faces. Different backgrounds. All pulling together.
Which is an interesting editorial choice in a plant that is about 99 percent white and mostly men.
The photos will fix that. Shot selection does a lot of heavy lifting. Put three guys from the same street in slightly different hard hats and suddenly you have a global tapestry.
Willy, like everybody at Life At The Company, lives inclusivity. Despite residing in a town that voted for Brexit, no xenophobia ever makes the pieces. The nearest you get to reality is someone saying they have learned a lot from working with people from different departments.
Still, Willy is flattered. All his EEEC work. All that brushing dogs and smiling for the Echo. It has finally paid off. He has a path now. From zero to mental health hero to Destination Zero poster boy.
Or so he thinks.
Make Up, Break Down – When The Eyeliner Slips
They are just about to start.
The videographer is checking levels. The comms person is practising questions about how much the culture means to him. The make-up artist is giving him a discreet bit of eyeliner so his eyes do not vanish under the strip lights.
Then someone’s phone buzzes.
The message is quick, clipped, and delivered like a production update. Dennis did not make it. Dogs Trust ICU has become Dogs Trust paperwork.
Willy feels something go out of him. The room does that slow sideways tilt you get when a forklift reverses too close to your toes. He swallows. Nods. Says he understands.
The eyeliner does not. It starts to run.
For half a second it is almost honest – a human being in a Cummins facility having a human reaction to a living creature dying after being marched through a corporate community support day.
Which is, of course, completely unacceptable.
The comms person is on it instantly. Tissues. Reassuring noises. Not about Dennis. About the footage.
The camera crew have already stopped rolling. Any sign of vulnerability is a compliance risk. Life At The Company is about resilience, not feelings.
Somewhere in the room an unspoken theory starts to bloom. Real grief does not compute, but suspicious eye movement does.
Wellbeing, Cummins Style – SAL Before Sympathy
The next day Willy is off. Heartbroken. The kind of off where you sit in the kitchen in your work boots because you cannot quite admit you are not going in.
Dennis is gone. The dog has a people-story. The video has been quietly binned.
Some small part of him still hopes Cummins will throw him a bone. A call. A message. A hint that someone, somewhere, understands that this is more than a scheduling issue.
What he gets instead is an invite.
Not a condolence card. A SAL meeting.
HR have lovingly advised him to avoid any potential germs that might force him up the SAL staircase – as long as it does not affect production numbers, obviously. Recovery is fine as long as it clocks in on time.
Willy reads the invite twice. The subject line is something neutral and bloodless – “supportive” or something similar – but the message is clear enough.
Your grief is yours. Our metrics are ours. Do not confuse the two.
Two Metres Apart, 30 Centimetres From Dave Close
The support plan is a masterpiece of Cummins logic.
If Willy really feels wobbly, he is encouraged to practise social distancing from germs. Not people. Germs. Because going through the SAL levels eventually becomes less supportive (if it ever were) and more unemployment line.
Stay two metres away from sickness where possible. Like the COVID rules. Bulletproof plan. Like when the plant lied about its production to operate throughout lockdowns.
Which would be great if he did not work on a production line built on the assumption that human beings stand 40 centimetres apart for eight hours while bits of metal fly past.
The only time the two metre rule has ever been enforced in that building was when Health and Safety man Dave Close marched up to people during the pandemic, stopped thirty centimetres from their faces, and loudly confronted them that standing close to team-mates was breaking the two metre rule. Even the late Dennis had more common sense than that,
You have to admire the commitment. If there is a contradiction, Cummins will stand right in the middle of it and shout the policy into your mouth.
So now Willy has a choice.
He can avoid germs and break output targets. Or he can hit the numbers and break his health and, by extension, the elderly relatives he resides with,
Officially it is his decision. Unofficially it is not a decision at all.
Destination Zero Empathy
The Life At The Company piece will still happen. The scripts are already written. By the time it goes live you will get the usual:
– A smiling shot of Willy in PPE
– A line about how much he loves the team culture
– A neat paragraph about how proud he is of EEEC and Dogs Trust work
– A closing sentence about Destination Zero and building a better future together
There will be no mention of Dennis ending his days wired up in Dogs Trust ICU after being dragged into a corporate feel-good day and suffering Death By Dodge.
No mention of Willy sitting at home the next day waiting for human contact and getting a SAL invite instead.
No mention of HR recommending he avoids germs as long as it does not impact production.
On paper Willy is thriving. In reality he is another body in a system where the only zeros that matter are on the emissions slide and the sickness chart.
Destination Zero. Zero accidents. Zero emissions. Zero room for the inconvenient fact that people and animals sometimes break when you run them at full tilt for long enough and then pretend the breaking is a personal failing.
Willy Workhorse will keep doing what he always does – turning up, ticking boxes, posing for someone else’s narrative. He wonders if his heartfelt email to sociopath HR Advisor Jenna Pink helped the company understand his feelings at all. It hasn’t entered his mind that his display of weakness might be used against him one day. That’s not how the world works, right?
Cummins will keep doing what it always does – turning complicated, messy, painful realities into neat paragraphs on a website and calling it care.
Dennis is gone. Willy is hurting. Destination Zero rolls on. And Willy’s pain? A loaded gun being pointed at his own head. He just doesn’t know it yet.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project