Cummins dropped two soft-focus newsroom pieces on the same day and accidentally explained the whole racket. One article turned Jose U., publicly identifiable through Pretty Ravens as Jose Urmeneta, into another Life at the Company warmth product. The other put Cummins India beside CII, cleaner air, public-private collaboration and a Decision Support System for Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad. One sells belonging. The other sells breathable virtue. Together, they ask the reader to stare at the lighting and forget the fucking ledger.
Cummins has been busy again, though not with the kind of work that would require answering awkward questions. The company has not explained why TCAP keeps finding dirty seams under the clean branding. It has not properly addressed the supplier-risk material, the emissions record, the litigation baggage, the boardroom optics or the fossil machinery still clanking away under the sustainability hymns.
Instead, the newsroom went back to the safe cupboard and pulled out two familiar costumes. First came the human story: Connecting a global workforce: Jose U.’s career at Cummins Inc. That piece presents Jose U. as a Senior Project Coordinator based in Nashville, Tennessee, working in Translation Services and helping employees across countries, languages and cultures feel informed, included and supported.
Then came the public-good story: Cummins and CII Strengthen Their Collaborative Commitment for Cleaner Air with the Launch of An Advanced Decision Support System. That release puts Cummins India beside CII, NITI Aayog, Pune, Pimpri Chinchwad, cleaner air, data-driven forecasting and a thick public-private civic glow.
Lovely pairing.
A person. A city. A recovery story. An air-quality story. A company with a dirty ledger trying to wrap itself in lungs and kindness.
Jose Is Not The Problem
Let’s get the obvious part out of the way before Cummins reaches for the victim costume. Jose Urmeneta is not the villain here.
Cummins says Jose U. grew up in Honduras, studied Communications and Public Relations at the University of South Alabama, worked across marketing, advertising, sales and account management, joined Cummins in 2018, and later moved into Translation Services. His work includes video translation, ASL interpretation coordination, eLearning localisation, document translation and multilingual communication initiatives.
The article also says that in 2023 he faced a brain tumour, underwent a 13-hour surgery, and received support from his manager and team while he recovered. That is a serious human experience. TCAP is not mocking it, minimising it or using it as a punchline.
By all visible accounts, Jose appears to be a talented, multilingual, resilient employee with a public creative life through Pretty Ravens. Good for him. Surviving something like that and still working, making music and helping people communicate is no small thing.
The problem is Cummins, and more specifically what Cummins does with people once the brand department gets its hands on them.
The Human Shield Factory Opens For Another Shift
These articles are useful to Cummins because they let the company wear a person’s life like a borrowed skin. An employee has a journey, so the newsroom turns it into employer branding. A worker has a health crisis, and recovery becomes culture proof. Someone brings an immigrant story, then the company folds it into the global inclusion brochure. A person makes music outside work, and Cummins pins that detail to the wall like proof the machine has a soul.
That is the trick. The person may be sincere, the support may be real, and his colleagues may genuinely have helped him through something frightening. None of that is being challenged here.
However, the corporate use of the story is still grubby. Cummins wants the reader to see Jose and feel something warm about Cummins. It wants the audience to absorb the message without noticing the transaction. Look at the person. Look at the support. Look at the belonging. Look at the gentle quote about “We Are Cummins”. Please do not look at the legal archive. Please do not look at the emissions settlement. Please do not look at the dirty supplier-chain questions. Please do not look at TCAP dragging Accelera, EVE, Huafei, 3M, data-centre fossil power and the wider Cummins ecosystem back under the lamp.
That is not storytelling. It is reputation laundering with a human face.
Cummins Can Translate Everything Except Accountability
The funniest part is that this one is about Translation Services.
Cummins wants applause because Jose helps employees across languages and regions access clear, accurate information. The article talks about equitable communication, cultural respect and making people feel understood. Fine. Translation is useful. Accessible communication matters. Employees working across languages should not be left outside the room because a corporation cannot be bothered to speak properly.
Here is the problem. Cummins can translate videos, documents, eLearning modules and internal material across languages. It can coordinate ASL interpretation, localise content, support global operations and tell everyone how communication builds inclusion.
Yet the company still cannot translate “answer the fucking question” into corporate behaviour.
When TCAP asks about EVE Energy, alleged forced labour and dirty nickel, Cummins goes quiet. Questions about data-centre fossil-power contradictions are met with the same corporate mime act. Boardroom optics, supplier risk, emissions history and disability-treatment issues disappear into that familiar locked drawer.
That is the real translation gap. Not Spanish to English. Not English to ASL. Not eLearning into another language. Accountability to action. Cummins still cannot manage that one.
The Disability Halo Looks Different From Inside The Factory
There is another reason this Jose Urmeneta piece lands so badly.
Cummins wants to publish a serious health story and have the reader absorb the intended message: look at this kind, supportive, humane employer. Look at the manager. Look at the team. Look at the recovery. Look at the culture. Look at the soft lighting around “We Are Cummins”.
Fine.
Now compare that with the Cummins TCAP knows.
TCAP is aware of an account involving a Cummins employee who had survived colon cancer and was later dismissed after low-value components appeared on eBay. According to information available to TCAP, the internal route into that dismissal was not a clean HR-led discovery process. It involved Chris Ball, a former colleague, allegedly finding the items, buying them himself, examining the tracking, and linking the parcel route to a Post Office near the employee’s home.
If accurate, that is not ordinary workplace reporting. That is vigilante investigation dressed up afterwards as corporate process.
The distinction matters. If an employee has a concern about theft, the proper route is simple enough: report the suspicion to management, HR, security or whichever internal function is supposed to deal with it. What does not look normal is a colleague buying items, checking parcel tracking, building a theory around a local Post Office, and then watching the company turn that amateur detective work into a disciplinary path against a cancer survivor.
Cancer is not a decorative sympathy detail when Cummins wants a warm culture article. In UK employment law, cancer sits in disability territory from diagnosis. So when Cummins publishes a health-recovery story as evidence of its humane culture, TCAP is entitled to remember other health stories that did not come with the same soft lighting.
There is another reason Chris Ball’s name matters to TCAP.
Through a DSAR, I saw a redacted statement about me that I understood to be from Chris Ball. The name was redacted, but the redaction was not subtle. In my view, that statement contained abhorrent allegations and character assassination. Nothing meaningful came of that particular little snake job, but it told me plenty about the atmosphere, the appetite and the kind of material Cummins was prepared to entertain when a person became inconvenient. Or how low Chris “Smashie” Ball, the 25+ stone vegan, will sink to in order to take moral high ground. Nobody on the team told tales when he admitted to lying about a hospital appointment because he needed to go to the bank during work hours. He expected camaraderie” then, and got it. Only to emerge as the biggest snitch in the factory.
That is the missing context behind the Jose Urmeneta article.
Jose is not the villain. His illness was real, his recovery deserves basic human respect, and his colleagues may genuinely have supported him. The issue is Cummins choosing which suffering becomes employer-brand gold and which suffering gets fed into the machinery.
One employee’s health crisis becomes a newsroom halo. Another worker’s cancer history allegedly did not stop the company from relying on a colleague’s amateur investigation in a dismissal process. My disability did not stop Cummins fighting the way it fought.
That is why TCAP does not faint with gratitude when Cummins publishes disability-adjacent warmth content. The company does not get to parade selected recovery stories while hoping nobody remembers how the machine behaves when the sick, disabled or inconvenient person is no longer useful to the brand.
Jose U. And The Half-Name Game
Cummins calls him Jose U.
Maybe that is privacy. Perhaps it is newsroom house style. It could also be caution, because Cummins may have noticed that TCAP now treats Life at the Company pieces as corporate exhibits rather than bedtime stories.
Whatever the reason, the half-name does not make the person fictional. Cummins says Jose U. is a member of Pretty Ravens. Public music profiles identify Pretty Ravens as Jose Urmeneta, and Pretty Ravens credits identify Jose Urmeneta as a writer and performer.
That is not a scandal. It is just another little example of the corporate control game. Cummins wants enough of the person to extract warmth, but not always enough identity to make the packaging fully searchable on Cummins’ terms.
TCAP is not playing that game. If Cummins wants to publish human beings as brand furniture, TCAP is allowed to notice that the human being is real, named, public and sitting inside a corporate content strategy.
Again, Jose is not the issue. The packaging is.
Cleaner Air, Dirtier Ledger
After the human warmth came the civic oxygen.
The cleaner-air release says Cummins in India, CII and NITI Aayog helped conceptualise the Cleaner Air Better Life initiative. It says CABL has become a national multi-stakeholder platform bringing together government, industry, academia, civil society and communities to address air pollution through task forces on clean transport, clean fuel, clean industry and biomass management.
A new Decision Support System is supposed to help Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad authorities make proactive, data-driven air-quality decisions. According to Cummins, the system will provide up to 72-hour forecasts, identify pollution hotspots, investigate emerging air-quality events and anticipate pollution episodes.
That sounds useful. Nobody at TCAP is rooting for worse air in Pune because Cummins put its logo near a solution. No sensible person wants farmers burning more crop residue just so a blog post can land harder. If the CABL initiative has helped reduce crop-residue burning, conserve water, support farmers and improve air-quality planning, good.
The problem is not cleaner air. It is Cummins renting cleaner air as moral cover while the wider company drags a dirty industrial record behind it like a corpse trolley.
Cummins Knows Clean Air Photographs Well
The cleaner-air numbers are the sort of figures PR departments love because they come pre-polished. Cummins says the CABL forum has reached over one lakh farmers, avoided 6.4 lakh tonnes of crop-residue burning, conserved 71 billion litres of water, reduced an estimated 1.3 lakh tonnes of CO₂ emissions, covered 432 villages and reached more than 4.8 lakh acres.
Those figures may reflect real work. Fine.
Now put them next to the rest of the machine. Cummins agreed to a $1.675 billion civil penalty in the United States over alleged Clean Air Act violations involving Ram engines. Reporting around the settlement described allegations involving defeat devices and undisclosed emission-control software features. The company denied wrongdoing, because of course it did, but the penalty and recall reality are not some activist hallucination.
That is the filthy context. A company with that record does not get to stand beside “cleaner air” and expect a standing ovation from anyone who can read.
It gets a note in the margin. It gets a reminder. It gets TCAP.
Decision Support For Everyone Except Cummins
The phrase Decision Support System is almost too perfect.
Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad apparently get predictive, data-driven tools to identify pollution hotspots and plan interventions. Municipal authorities get forecasts. Public bodies get analysis. The system helps them see what is coming before the air gets worse.
Excellent.
Can Cummins install one in Columbus? Someone should wire a Decision Support System into the executive floor and set it to detect reputational hypocrisy events. A dashboard could flash whenever Cummins publishes a human warmth story while ignoring human damage elsewhere. Another alert could trigger when cleaner-air copy appears too close to emissions history. A third alarm might activate when Accelera tries to look like the future while the company sells fossil bridge power to data-centre demand.
High hypocrisy risk detected.
Recommended intervention: stop bullshitting.
Secondary recommendation: answer questions before the archive answers for you.
Tertiary recommendation: do not use nice employees as soft armour while the legal, ESG and communications departments pretend the hard questions are not happening.
Sadly, Cummins does not appear to have purchased that module.
The Same Trick In Two Costumes
The Jose Urmeneta article and the cleaner-air release are not separate accidents. They are the same corporate trick in two costumes.
One says Cummins sees people. The other says Cummins sees communities. One sells belonging across languages, while the other sells public-private action across cities. Both invite the reader to form the same emotional conclusion: Cummins is caring, inclusive, civic and good.
That is the desired effect.
Corporate communications rarely confesses. Instead, it surrounds. A human story here, a cleaner-air initiative there, an employee group, a civic platform, a sustainability phrase, a public quote, a recovery story, a farmer statistic, a city dashboard, a community initiative and a line about making people’s lives better.
By the time the reader reaches the end, Cummins hopes the ledger has gone blurry.
It has not.
Real Good Does Not Cancel Corporate Filth
This is where the company always hides.
Some of the good may be real. Jose’s colleagues may really have supported him. Translation Services may really improve employee access. CABL may really help farmers, communities and cities. The Decision Support System may really be useful for air-quality planning in Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad.
Good.
Now stop using that as a bath for the rest of the company.
A real employee’s good experience does not erase another employee’s alleged mistreatment. A cleaner-air initiative in India does not erase the Clean Air Act settlement in the United States. Translation work does not erase corporate silence. A recovery story does not turn the employer into a saint. A data platform does not make the old combustion empire holy.
Two things can be true at once. Something can help people, and Cummins can still be using it cynically. Adults understand this. Corporate communications departments rely on people pretending they do not.
TCAP refuses.
Cummins India Gets Praise While The Engine Room Keeps Burning
Cummins India describes itself as a leading power-solutions provider involved in power generation, aftermarket and export businesses. It has manufacturing plants, assembly and distribution facilities, customer touchpoints and thousands of employees.
That is not a side room. It is infrastructure.
This matters because Cummins does not merely comment on pollution from a distance. The company is part of the industrial world that creates, powers, services and monetises the systems sitting underneath the air-quality conversation. Cleaner-air credit is useful, but the old machine remains deeply embedded in power generation, aftermarket support and the wider engine economy.
That is the Cummins problem in miniature.
Cleaner direction here. Dirty inheritance there. New dashboard up front. Old machine in the back.
The word “cleaner” does a lot of heavy lifting because Cummins rarely gets to say “clean” without someone coughing. Cleaner than what? Cleaner where? Cleaner compared with which part of the Cummins empire? Cleaner after how much diesel, how much combustion, how much fossil bridging, how much green transition theatre, how much legal spend and how much silence?
Cummins keeps asking for applause because some corners of the machine are pointed in a less dirty direction. TCAP keeps asking why the rest of it is still smoking in the corridor.
The Newsroom Wants A Hug
This is not journalism from Cummins. It is corporate hug architecture.
The Jose piece wraps the company in resilience, immigration, music, inclusion and workplace support. Meanwhile, the cleaner-air release wraps it in civic responsibility, data, farmers, water, emissions reductions and healthier cities.
Both pieces are designed to be difficult to attack without sounding like you hate people, clean air or recovery from illness. That is why the tactic is so fucking slippery.
If you criticise the Jose article, Cummins can pretend you are attacking Jose. TCAP is not. Criticise the cleaner-air release, and the company can pretend you are against cleaner air. TCAP is not.
The target is the machine that puts these stories to work. It is the company that uses real people and real projects as insulation against a wider record it would rather not discuss. Most of all, it is the newsroom that keeps dressing reputation management as morality.
The Human Shield Is Not To Blame For The Shield
Jose Urmeneta did not create Cummins’ emissions history. He did not write the data-centre fossil-power pitch. There is no suggestion he picked EVE Energy, appointed Jennifer Rumsey to 3M’s board, crafted litigation strategy, or helped create TCAP’s archive.
He is not responsible for the company turning his story into a brand asset.
That distinction matters. A human shield is not guilty of being placed in front of the machine. The machine is guilty of placing him there.
Cummins wants the sympathy generated by Jose’s story to spill over onto Cummins itself. It wants the reader to feel warmth towards the company because a real person had a real experience inside it.
TCAP is separating the person from the packaging.
The person gets left alone.
The packaging gets cut open.
Same Day, Same Machine
Taken together, the two articles tell you exactly where Cummins is trying to move.
One hand offers belonging. The other offers cleaner air. In the middle sits a company that wants to be seen as humane, sustainable, global, inclusive and civic while its archive keeps producing less flattering receipts.
The newsroom is not random. It is a pressure valve.
When the company looks dirty, publish cleaner air. If it looks cold, publish a human story. When the fossil machinery becomes too visible, publish innovation. If the legal record looks grubby, publish culture. Once the silence problem becomes obvious, publish communication.
That is the rhythm. TCAP sees it, and TCAP is bored of pretending not to.
TCAP’s Own Forecast
Here is TCAP’s Decision Support System.
Inputs: Cummins publishes Jose Urmeneta’s human story; Cummins publishes cleaner-air PR with CII; Cummins still carries emissions history, supplier questions, data-centre fossil-power positioning, boardroom optics, litigation baggage and strategic silence.
Output: extreme hypocrisy risk.
Recommended action: unspin immediately.
So here it is. Jose Urmeneta is not the villain. Translation access is useful. Pune deserves cleaner air. Farmers avoiding crop burning is good. Air-quality forecasting can help cities make better decisions.
But Cummins does not get to launder the wider ledger through nice people, cleaner-air slogans and carefully selected disability-adjacent recovery stories.
Not after the diesel record. Not after the silence. Not while the newsroom keeps mistaking human beings for armour plating. Not while the company keeps trying to turn every decent thing near it into evidence that the whole machine has been absolved.
Cummins wants the public to see the person, the dashboard and the clean-air banner.
TCAP sees the ledger behind them.
And the ledger is still fucking filthy.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Cummins – Connecting A Global Workforce: Jose U.’s Career At Cummins Inc.
- GigTown – Pretty Ravens
- Cummins – Cummins And CII Strengthen Their Collaborative Commitment For Cleaner Air With The Launch Of An Advanced Decision Support System
- CII-ITC Centre Of Excellence For Sustainable Development – Cleaner Air Better Life
- CII Foundation – Crop Residue Management
- EPA – 2024 Cummins Inc. Vehicle Emission Control Violations Settlement
- AP – Engine Maker Cummins Agrees To Pay $1.67 Billion To Settle Claims It Bypassed Emissions Tests
- Cancer Research UK – The Disability Discrimination Act, Equality Act And Cancer
- Macmillan Cancer Support – Cancer and Employment Rights