Cummins Confidential Special : Most Farcically Decorated Company of the Year Award 2025 – Winners!

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Google asks if Cummins is ethical. We ask if the company even exists outside its paid badges, fumes and tribunal bundles.

When Google Becomes Your PR Department

I did not even type it.

Google just threw the question at me like a helpful little corporate butler:

“Is Cummins an ethical company?”

Not a search term. A pre-loaded question at the top of the page. You click, and up pops the pre-loaded answer and the machine hands you a neat answer back.

You get the ethics page. You get the awards. You get the World’s Most Ethical Companies badge. But the spine of the answer the internet wants you to see is simple enough.

Yes. Cummins is ethical. Look, it has a plaque.

Ethics As A Subscription Service

On paper, Cummins is one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies. Sixteen consecutive years, courtesy of Ethisphere. That’s what Google spat at me. As I shit you not my friends, I spat my coffee over my laptop screen. The phrase is everywhere. Ethics and Compliance page. Corporate news. LinkedIn sermons. Town hall decks.

So what does that actually mean?

It does not mean a regulator has audited their soul and signed off the findings. It does not mean a judge has weighed every allegation and found the company spotless. It means Cummins pays to participate in a commercial programme.

You fill out long forms about culture, compliance, governance, third-party risk. You feed in policies, structures, risk statements. Ethisphere scores what you claim to do. In return you get benchmarking, consultancy and, if your paperwork looks pretty enough, a place on the list and the right to splash the logo everywhere. It more self-marked homework that suddenly has Cummins up there with the best.

Nobody from Ethisphere is standing in Darlington or Daventry asking the guy on the line what really happens when he gets ill. Nobody is cross-referencing tribunal decisions, EEOC cases or whistle-blower accounts against the score. The system is built on what the company reckons about itself.

Ethics, in this model, is not something you are. It is something you subscribe to.

Which is very handy if you are Cummins. You can cheat on emissions on a continental scale, take record penalties and ongoing recall obligations, fight disabled employees in court with child-rape barristers, quietly pay out to investors who say you misled them – and still call yourself one of the most ethical companies in the world because the forms, fees and consultants say so.

Side A: The Disability Inclusion Farce

We have seen this film before.

Side A of this mess is the Disability Equality Index. Cummins has a perfect 100 there too. Best Place to Work for Disability Inclusion. Five years straight. Diversity slides. Disability Fundamentals training. Employee resource groups.

Then you look at how that index works. Another self-reported questionnaire. Another corporate membership fee. Another scheme that does not go near employment tribunals or EEOC dockets or the lived experiences of disabled staff unless the employer chooses to mention them.

On paper Cummins is a disability inclusion paradise. In reality you have cases like Waqas Mohammed – a machinist whose mental health collapsed, who needed support and got discipline and dismissal instead. A tribunal finds discrimination and unfair dismissal. Cummins appeals on technicalities and drags it out.

You have me and others pushed into litigation when our health and complaints became inconvenient to the business. You have EEOC settlements on disability and pay discrimination.

None of that dents the index score. Because the index is not reading the case law. It is reading the forms Cummins fills in about itself.

On disability, Cummins buys into a benchmark, fills out the survey, walks away with a 100 and a badge while disabled workers are taken apart in real time.

Side B: World’s Most Ethical

Side B is the Ethisphere game. Different logo, same racket.

Cummins pays to participate. Supplies data. Gets scored. Lands on the list for the sixteenth time and plasters it everywhere as proof of its moral greatness.

Now line that up with the realities they do not print on the plaque.

Nearly a million Ram trucks with defeat devices fitted. A record Clean Air Act penalty. Government enforcement statements describing emissions cheating, falsehoods and recall obligations that will run for years. Shareholder litigation accusing Cummins of misleading the market about those same defeat devices, now edging towards settlement while the company clings to its line of no bad faith.

Tribunals and appeals involving disabled workers. EEOC cases over medical privacy and pay. A culture that treats sickness, distress and dissent as operational problems to be neutralised, not human realities to be dealt with.

In a sane world that history would be a serious obstacle to any kind of World’s Most Ethical label. In our world it is background noise. The scoring model looks at what Cummins says about ethics and culture, not what it actually does when someone falls ill or blows the whistle.

Result: another shining badge for the trophy cabinet.

What Is Real At Cummins?

So what does exist at Cummins? Overpromoted bastards that aren’t held to account? Sure.

Real: a diesel and data-centre empire that has made billions selling engines that only met emissions rules because somebody had a bright idea about cheating the tests. Yes, real.

Real: enforcement documents, consent decrees, recall programmes, investor suits, OSHA and EPA entries stacked up in Violation Tracker. Check.

Real: a machinist called Waqas who had to go to tribunal to prove that sacking him in the middle of a mental-health crisis was discrimination. Check.

Real: a claimant called Lee writing this, who told Cummins Director of Ethics he was falling apart and got treated as a conduct risk to be managed out.

Real: EEOC press releases about Cummins Power Generation having to pay because it demanded family medical history and sacked an employee when he objected. Wow, real.

Real: the day-to-day fear and exhaustion of anybody inside that machine who becomes inconvenient – too ill, too vocal, too honest.

Those are not opinions. They have case numbers and claim references and government logos at the top of the page.

Next to that, what weight does a World’s Most Ethical badge really have.

Ethics In A Name Badge

There is another part of the façade nobody ever talks about – the actual humans paid to front it.

Cummins has a Director of Ethics and Compliance. Kevin Graham. On the org chart he is the conscience of the company. The guy you go to when you are being chewed up by the system. The man whose title says he exists to stop exactly the sort of story you are reading.

I wrote to him. In detail. I told him exactly how bad my mental health had got. I told him I was suicidal. Not in vague terms. In black and white.

Shortly afterwards, I was lined up for the Darlington axe anyway. No meaningful protection. No visible intervention. No sign that ethics had anything to say about a mentally ill employee being pushed over the edge after raising concerns. I did get signposted to the laughably robotic EAP though. A shortcut though ethics training. Problems? Pass the pamphlet. It’s basically everything you’re supposed to do in your job, contracted out. So what exactly are YOU doing all day?

If Cummins really is one of the most ethical companies on earth, if that badge is anything more than a sticker, what does that make its Director of Ethics.

Did Kevin Graham sign off the Ethisphere paperwork after the guy who had just told him he was suicidal was pushed out> Did he tick the boxes, send the cheque, add the logo to the slide deck, knowing full well what was happening on the ground?

On the forms, I am sure the culture indicators still looked lovely. In my inbox it read like a sick joke.

If This Hits Too Close To Home

If you are reading this because you are living your own version of the ethical employer nightmare, a quick word that is not about Cummins at all.

You are not weak or dramatic for being wrecked by this stuff. Capability meetings, investigation letters, manufactured conduct allegations, legal threats – it all lands on the same nervous system that still has to cook, clean, parent, pay rent and exist. It is brutal and it is meant to be.

If you are in the UK and your head is going to dangerous places, you can:

  • Call Samaritans on 116 123 (free, 24/7) or go to samaritans.org for email and online options.
  • Talk to your GP and ask for urgent mental-health support.

If you are in the US:

  • Call or text 988, or chat via 988lifeline.org, to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

If you are somewhere else, check your health ministry or local health service website for crisis numbers, or talk to a doctor, therapist, or someone you trust offline. If you are in immediate danger, use your local emergency number.

None of that will fix Cummins. It is there to keep you alive long enough to decide what you want to do next. Corporations are replaceable. You are not. They exist for profit, not for you. Make peace with that any look after yourselves.

Most Farcically Decorated Company Of The Year 2025

So let us answer Google properly.

Is Cummins an ethical company? No. Fuck no. It is a diesel and data-centre behemoth that learned how to game every ethical and inclusion benchmark in sight while racking up real-world harm. It has turned ethics into a paperwork exercise and disability into a PR theme.

The only things in this story that actually exist are the fumes, the fines and the people left picking up the pieces. Everything else is a costume. Expensive costume.

For the sheer audacity of waving around World’s Most Ethical Company and Best Place to Work for Disability Inclusion while all of this sits in the court record and in people’s medical notes, TCAP is proud to confer a special honour.

Cummins Inc – Most Farcically Decorated Company of the Year, 2025.

Stick that one in the ethics cabinet. Stick it on Graham’s desk, if he even bothers to sit at it. He could be on a beach somewhere sending the EAP leaflet out remotely. Wherever you are Kev, know this, you earned this one.

Lee Thompson – Best TCAP Journalist 2025 – The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

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