Rio Tinto is not some incidental name floating around the edge of Cummins’ world. Cummins has publicly celebrated the relationship, saying Rio runs around 450 high-horsepower Cummins engines across Pilbara, is upgrading more than 200 Komatsu 830E and 930E haul trucks with Cummins QSK60 engines, and worked alongside Rio on the renewable diesel transition at Kennecott, where 97 haul trucks and heavy machines were moved across. Splendid. Because once you step away from the case-study gloss and into Rio’s actual record, you run headlong into Juukan Gorge, a workplace culture report soaked in bullying and sexism, contamination litigation in Madagascar, and a $15 million SEC penalty over Guinea. This is not industrial virtue. It is a mining leviathan with Cummins wired into the drivetrain and wreckage strewn behind it.

Cummins Has Hitched Itself To Rio Properly

There is no mileage here in pretending the Rio link is faint, accidental, or old news. Cummins has not merely brushed shoulders with Rio Tinto at some trade fair and moved on. It has marketed Rio as a success story. Pilbara haulage. QSK engines. Komatsu truck upgrades. Nammuldi trials. Kennecott renewable diesel. Reliability, performance, savings, efficiency, the whole polished hymn sheet.

So let’s dispense with the polite fiction. Cummins has embedded itself in the machinery that keeps Rio’s extraction empire in motion.

And Rio is not some unfairly maligned corporate innocent. It is a company whose record is so ugly that even its official apologies read like paperwork laid over a crater.

Juukan Gorge Was Reduced To Dust

In May 2020, Rio Tinto detonated the 46,000-year-old rock shelters at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara. Not an obscure patch of scrub. Not an archaeological footnote. A site of profound cultural significance to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people. A place containing evidence of continuous human occupation stretching back beyond most of recorded civilisation.

Then Rio blew it apart.

The political and public backlash was immense. A parliamentary inquiry followed. Senior executives, including chief executive Jean-Sébastien Jacques, departed. Rio later accepted that what happened was a profound failure and a breach of trust.

Quite right too. But the shelters were still gone. The ore still moved. The quarterly machine still churned.

That is the part worth dwelling on. Human history was obliterated for the convenience of a mining timetable, and yet the industrial system around it barely paused. Cummins cannot wrap itself in the language of technology and progress when one of its prized mining customers has already demonstrated what progress looks like once sacred ground becomes commercially inconvenient.

The Workplace Was Brutal By Design

Rio’s 2022 Everyday Respect review was not some fiddly HR embarrassment inflated by consultants. It was a devastating portrait of a workplace in which bullying was systemic, sexual harassment and everyday sexism were rife, racism was widespread in a number of areas, and harmful conduct was often tolerated, minimised, or simply absorbed into the culture.

Nearly half of respondents reported personal experiences of bullying.

That is not a handful of bad apples. That is an institutional order in which degradation becomes ambient. A culture that does not merely fail to protect people, but steadily abrades them.

Rio’s 2024 progress review insisted that real change had been made and that all 26 recommendations had been largely implemented. Fine. Even that review still acknowledged that harmful behaviours persisted and that major challenges remained.

Which is another way of saying the beast did not become civilised because management commissioned a better report and learned some softer vocabulary.

Madagascar Is Still Living With The Consequences

Then there is Madagascar, where Rio Tinto’s QMM mine continues to generate allegations serious enough to stand on their own without rhetorical ornament.

In 2024, Leigh Day announced legal action in the UK on behalf of villagers living near the mine, alleging pollution had caused them to ingest dangerous levels of uranium and lead, with blood tests said to show dangerous lead exposure. Rio denies the allegations and points to its own monitoring. That dispute will travel where it travels.

But the wider point survives intact. This is yet another live contamination fight attached to a company Cummins helps keep operational.

And that is the pattern with Rio. The corporate version is always polished, measured, responsible, and immaculately formatted. The version emerging from affected communities is harsher, angrier, and much harder to smother. Claims letters, blood tests, and litigation have a habit of preserving what corporate prose is written to dissolve.

Guinea Cost Rio $15 Million

If you prefer your corporate disgrace with a regulator’s letterhead on top, Rio has that as well.

In 2023, the SEC charged Rio Tinto over books-and-records and internal-controls failures linked to a bribery scheme involving a consultant retained to help preserve mining rights in Guinea. According to the SEC, the consultant’s real qualification was his personal relationship with a senior government official. Rio settled without admitting or denying the findings and paid a $15 million civil penalty.

Standard elite-housekeeping stuff. Pay. Settle. Deny the juicy part. Continue.

And again, the point is not that Guinea is identical to Juukan, or Juukan identical to Madagascar. The point is accumulation. Different jurisdictions. Different forms of damage. Different kinds of fallout. Same broad pattern of appetite, power, and consequence arriving in the usual order.

Another Cummins Customer With Ruin Attached

That is why Rio Tinto belongs in Customer Corner.

Because this is what the Cummins ecosystem looks like once you stop gawping at torque figures and start reading the record. Cummins powers a mining giant tied to the destruction of Juukan Gorge, a workplace culture report exposing systemic bullying and serious levels of sexism and racism, litigation over alleged contamination in Madagascar, and a US enforcement action over Guinea.

That is not guilt by random adjacency. It is a documented commercial relationship attached to a documented corporate history.

The engines are sometimes impressive. Fine. The logistics are formidable. Fine. The production volumes are enormous. Fine. But so what? A company can move mountains and still leave behind a moral crater.

And when Cummins chooses to bolt itself into enterprises like this, the damage does not stay neatly with the miner.

The ore leaves. The profits land. The apology machine whirs. The wreckage, sadly, remains.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Customer Corner : Rio Tinto – Juukan Ruin, Workplace Misery And Another Mining Bastard Cummins Still Powers