Fake Awards Updates: Cummins bought ethics. Cummins bought disability inclusion. Now they have a mental health award and a whole mentalhealth.cummins.com microsite to hang it on. Of course they do.
Meet The Golden Noose
Just as we start pulling apart how far the Most Farcically Decorated Company of the Year will go for a badge, we stumble on the mental health chapter at the bottom of the cabinet.
Cummins has not only collected ethics plaques and disability scores. It has built a separate little shrine for your feelings. A branded mentalhealth.cummins.com portal wrapped around its global “It’s OK” campaign, fully stocked with a Gold Bell Seal for Workplace Mental Health and a Platinum Hermes Creative Award for the comms.
So TCAP is pleased to announce a new honour.
The Golden Noose – for outstanding use of mental health branding while breaking people anyway.
Because what sits behind Cummins mental health glory looks very familiar. Another application. Another scoring rubric. Another marketing toolkit. More self-written homework telling the world how compassionate they are while the people who actually fell apart have tribunal numbers and medical notes instead of trophies.
Fuck Me – There Is A Mental Health Award
Let us start with the corporate press release.
In June 2025 Cummins proudly announced it had “received two national honours” for workplace mental health. A Gold Bell Seal from Mental Health America. A Platinum Hermes Creative Award for “It’s OK”, the internal campaign they run with their friendly agency Westcomm. Management quotes about “our people are our greatest strength”. Language about leadership and stigma and support.
On the microsite you get the same vibe turned up to eleven. World Mental Health Day. Mindfulness topics. testimonial videos. global resources in 23 languages.
From the outside it looks like a serious mental health infrastructure. A specialist URL. A gold seal. A creative award.
From the inside, if you have ever been on the wrong end of this company, it reads like a joke. A fucking cruel joke.
Mental Health As A Microsite
Look at what mentalhealth.cummins.com really is.
An internal comms agency spells it out for you. “It’s OK” is a global employee engagement initiative. Monthly topics. posters and flyers. digital signage. videos. text messages. wellness articles. The full corporate communications kit to “normalise” conversations about mental health.
This is not a clinic. It is a campaign. A content vertical bolted onto the same machine that will absolutely treat your diagnosed condition as a conduct and performance risk if you become expensive or loud.
The disclaimers on their own material say it all. The videos are “not intended to constitute medical advice”. The resources are general information. The real engine behind the site is the same as every other Cummins programme. Brand management. risk smoothing. holding page.
At the heart of the microsite is the only actual service with teeth. The EAP. Outsourced counsellors at the end of a phone. Line managers and ethics staff punt you that direction, tick the box and get back to targets.
Mental health at Cummins, in this model, is a landing page and a leaflet.
Bell Seal By Application Form
Now strip the shine off the Gold Bell Seal itself.
Mental Health America is very clear about how this works. Employers apply for Bell Seal certification. They pay a one-off application fee. Sound familiar? They complete a long self-assessment about their policies, benefits, culture and practices. Sound familiar? MHA staff score those answers against their proprietary Bell Seal rubric and issue a rating. Bronze. Silver. Gold. Platinum. We say The Bell End Award is more apt here.
Recipients get
- a high-level scoring report
- the right to use the Bell Seal logo
- a listing on MHA’s recipients page
- a promotion toolkit to brag about their status
It is not a forensic investigation. It is not a statutory inspection. Nobody at MHA is ploughing through Employment Tribunal judgments in the UK or EEOC case files in the US to see how Cummins actually behaves when someone with a mental illness refuses to roll over.
It is another application system. Another set of questions answered by the employer about itself. Another fee-based programme where the output is a badge and some talking points for the ESG slide deck.
Gold Bell Seal is not evidence that Cummins has stopped wrecking people. It is evidence that Cummins has learned exactly how to fill out these forms.
A Hermes For The Poster, Not The Pain
The second “honour” in the press release is even more brazen.
Cummins also won a Platinum Hermes Creative Award for the “It’s OK” campaign. Hermes is not a clinical body. It is a creative industry awards scheme for marketing and communications. Entries are judged on concept, writing, design and overall brand execution.
In other words. Hermes looked at the posts and flyers and microsite and said the campaign was well put together. That is it. No one at Hermes asked how many people on long-term sick were being forced through capability. No one weighed tribunal findings or discrimination claims against the cheerful video testimonials filmed for World Mental Health Day.
So when Cummins cites “two national honours for workplace mental health and creative communication”, it really means
- one certification based on a paid application and self-reported culture survey; and
- one statue for the quality of the internal marketing campaign.
People get breakdowns. Cummins gets a trophy for the leaflet.
Inside The Machine
Now hold the Gold Bell Seal and Hermes statue up against what we already know lives behind the wallpaper.
A machinist called Waqas Mohammed whose mental health collapsed and who told Cummins he needed help. What he got was a disciplinary process and dismissal. A tribunal found discrimination and unfair dismissal. Cummins appealed on technical arguments and dragged it out anyway.
An employee called Lee who emailed the Director of Ethics and Compliance in detail to say he was suicidal, overwhelmed and hanging on by threads. The response. Signposting to the outsourced EAP. A culture that then treated him as a conduct risk to be nudged out of Darlington and buried under process.
Cases in the US where Cummins Power Generation had to pay up after demanding intrusive medical information and sacking an employee when he objected. Another where the company faced claims over pay discrimination. The same employer now standing in a mental health spotlight as a model of good practice.
You can add your own stories if you have ever had the misfortune of trying to get real adjustments inside that company. Sick notes questioned. performance plans. HR letters dripping with concern on page one and implied threat on page two. The soothing language of “support” wrapped around a clear message. Calm down. Get back to work. Or get out.
That is the context for the Gold Bell Seal and the shiny Hermes. Not an abstract philosophical puzzle. A real history of real people getting ground up.
If This Hits Too Close To Home
None of this is here to tell you what to do about your own job or case. But if you are reading this because you are stuck in a similar “wellbeing” nightmare, a quick reminder that has nothing to do with Cummins and everything to do with staying alive. We know we touched this in our last piece but no apologies for repeating it.
You are not overreacting if this stuff is wrecking you. Capability meetings. investigation letters. manufactured conduct allegations. legal threats. It all piles into the same nervous system that still has to feed you, house you and deal with everything else. It is meant to wear you down.
If you are in the UK and your head is going to dangerous places you can
- call Samaritans on 116 123 free and 24/7 or use samaritans.org for email and web options
- talk to your GP and ask for urgent mental-health support
If you are in the US you can
- call or text 988 or use 988lifeline.org to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline
If you are somewhere else, look up crisis numbers via your health ministry or local health service. Talk to a doctor, a therapist, someone you trust offline. If you are in immediate danger use your local emergency number.
None of those numbers will fix the company that hurt you. They exist to keep you alive long enough to decide what happens next. Corporations are replaceable. You are not.
The Golden Noose
So yes. Just as we start testing how deep the Most Farcically Decorated Company of the Year will sink, we find the mental health chapter waiting at the bottom.
Cummins has an ethics halo bought through Ethisphere. A disability inclusion badge bought through Disability:IN. Now a mental health halo bought through Bell Seal and polished with a Hermes for the creative.
On paper it all looks immaculate. In reality you have tribunal findings. EEOC settlements. workers on medication being hauled through process. and people like me sitting alone at 3am writing to a Director of Ethics who punts you to the EAP and then watches HR sharpen the knife.
That is why TCAP is hanging a different prize on this bit of the story.
Cummins Inc – inaugural winner of the Golden Noose for Workplace Mental Health 2025.
A gold rope for a company that built a whole website and award wall around “It’s OK” while proving over and over that for the wrong person at the wrong time it absolutely is not.
And since Cummins hires a child-rape forensics KC to help beat disabled claimants, it seems only right to invite Wendy Miller KC of St Philips Chambers to present the Golden Noose on their behalf. When your idea of “support” is courtroom firepower and capability letters, you might as well let your barrister hand you the Golden Noose too. For a fee, of course.
Honourable Mention : The Golden Collar
With all these plaques flying around for ethics, disability and mental health, it was only a matter of time before the TCAP canine division kicked off.
Oscar has formally applied for The Golden Collar for 2025 best canine mascot. Strong case. Solid bedside manner. Never once fitted a defeat device. Puppy-dog eyes are a kind of defeat device. Less polluting. More manipulative.
But if we are pretending to take awards seriously, then on any sane metric the real frontrunner lives up the road at Dogs Trust Darlington. His recovery from Willy Workhorse Dodge Ram ownership was no walk in the park, but Dennis showed us all that happiness after tough times is possible again. His work with humans is doing more for real wellbeing in an afternoon than Cummins has managed with an entire mental health microsite and a box of certificates.
So, provisional scoreboard
- Cummins – Most Farcically Decorated Company of the Year 2025
- Cummins – Golden Noose for Workplace Mental Health 2025
- Dennis – unofficial Golden Collar for Best Canine Mascot 2025
One of those three is genuinely improving lives. Spoiler. It is not the diesel giant. As for Oscar, chin up. You will still get your triangle of The Laughing Cow later. You did not lose. You were runner-up.
Verdict : It Is Very Much Not OK
So. Back to the simple question the algorithm threw at me.
Is Cummins an ethical company.
No. Fuck no. Double fuck no. It is a diesel and data-centre behemoth that has learned how to game every ethical, disability and mental health benchmark in sight while racking up real world harm. It has turned ethics into a subscription, inclusion into a survey result and mental health into a marketing campaign.
The only things in this tale that actually exist are the fumes, the fines and the people left picking up the pieces. Everything else is costume. Expensive costume.
For the sheer audacity of waving around World’s Most Ethical Company, Best Place to Work for Disability Inclusion and a Gold Bell Seal for mental health while all of this sits in court records and medical notes, TCAP is happy to make it official.
Cummins Inc – Most Farcically Decorated Company of the Year 2025 and now proud owner of the Golden Noose. (once Wendy hands the thing over).
Frame that one and file it on the Ethics wall. Right next to the Bell Seal. If Kevin Graham ever swings past his inbox between culture decks, he can decide whether to log it as a near-miss, a learning opportunity or just another distressed employee problem successfully neutralised.
Lee Thompson – Best TCAP Journalist 2025 – The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- 2025 Bell Seal Recipients List – Mental Health America (confirming Cummins Inc. as a recipient)
- Cummins Awarded for Mental Health Leadership (Gold Bell Seal and Hermes Award Announcement
- Cummins Recognizes World Mental Health Day (“It’s OK” Campaign Details)
- Cummins Named 2023 Best Place to Work for Disability Inclusion (Disability:IN Recognition)