Michael Abbott did not inherit a tidy employee-relations file. He inherited a sick employee, a broken Occupational Health process, disputed pay, a stack of unanswered concerns and an HR relationship already coming apart at the bolts.
By 5 December 2022, Abbott knew exactly why I was absent. I told him my ongoing absence related to a depressive and anxiety disorder. I also explained that Cummins had filled an Occupational Health referral with IBS material while my current sickness absence concerned my mental health.
Three days later, Michael Abbott sent me a Capability Review invitation.
That was his opening move. Abbott had barely finished reading the file before Cummins started preparing to discuss whether it could continue employing me. The company had a man signed off with mental-health problems. Its answer was to start setting the table for capability.
It was not subtle. It was not caring. What it was doing was the fucking machine doing what it does when a person becomes inconvenient.
A GP Warning Became A Scheduling Problem
On 13 December, my GP advised that I was unfit to attend the Capability Review meeting arranged for the following day. Abbott postponed it. Fair enough. Nobody gets applause for not forcing an unwell employee into a hearing.
However, his email still made clear that the sickness-absence process would need to be concluded “in due course”.
That little phrase matters. It showed the conveyor belt was still running. My health did not change the destination. Instead, it merely delayed the next stop.
Michael Abbott later made the same cold calculation in his witness statement. He said my GP had advised that I was unfit for the Capability Review meeting “even though” the GP had said I was fit to return to work.
That is not a contradiction. It is basic fucking common sense.
A phased return to ordinary work is not the same as sitting in a formal meeting about whether you can remain employed. One is a controlled route back into a job. The other is a high-pressure hearing with dismissal sat in the room like an unpaid debt.
Nevertheless, Abbott chose to present the difference as evidence that I was inconsistent.
Michael Abbott Built A Behaviour Dossier
By 4 January 2023, Abbott had an up-to-date fit note saying I was unfit for work until 28 February. The note recorded mixed anxiety and depressive disorder alongside work-related stress.
He knew I was unwell. He knew about the medication changes. And he was aware that I said Cummins’ conduct, my pay position and the absence process were making my health worse.
Abbott even later wrote that he had tried to limit the number of emails he sent because he did not want to exacerbate my symptoms.
Yet that knowledge did not produce a proper communication plan.
There was no one clear channel. There was no agreed response schedule. Nobody said, “Lee is struggling. Let us stop turning every issue into six separate skirmishes and manage this safely.”
Instead, Abbott built an Occupational Health referral around my reaction to the fucking mess.
The final version listed the volume of my emails, my tone, changed positions about holiday and meetings, reports to authorities, reputational threats and other conduct. Then it asked Occupational Health whether my behaviour could be linked to my mental-health conditions and whether I was fit for capability.
That is where the referral stopped looking like support and started looking like a corporate character file.
“What Kind Of Behaviour Can Be Expected?”
Michael Abbott’s referral asked what kind of behaviour could be expected if my mental-health conditions were potentially linked to my behaviour.
What kind of behaviour can be expected?
That is a hell of a thing to write about an employee you know is signed off with anxiety, depression and work-related stress.
It was not enough to ask what support I needed. Abbott wanted Occupational Health to consider whether my distress could explain the behaviour Cummins had decided to catalogue.
The referral said I sent Abbott 61 emails in 11 working days. Fine. I sent a lot of emails. I was angry, stressed and trapped in a row about my job, my money, my medical position, my return to work and the HR people supposedly managing it.
That number does not prove I was easy to deal with. It also does not prove I was trying to confuse anybody.
More importantly, it should have triggered structure. A distressed employee sending repeated emails needs a clear route for answers, a single point of contact and a process that does not add more friction every time he asks a question.
Michael Abbott did the opposite. He turned the volume into evidence.
That is the difference between supporting somebody in difficulty and constructing a dossier about why they are difficult.
He Called It Deliberate
Abbott’s witness statement tells the real story.
He wrote that he understood I had health issues. Then he said he thought my behaviour was “deliberate”, intended to put unreasonable pressure on Cummins and on him personally, “perhaps to cause confusion”.
Perhaps.
Abbott had no access to my mind. He had emails from a man signed off with mental-health problems, caught in a worsening dispute and increasingly losing faith in the people managing it.
Still, he decided the distress had intent behind it.
That is not evidence. It is an HR manager’s interpretation of a sick employee’s state of mind.
The statement repeats the trick. When I changed my position about holiday arrangements during a pay dispute, Abbott said it was “abundantly clear” that I was trying to create confusion and mistakes inside Cummins. When I asked for him to be removed from my case after the relationship had collapsed, he treated that request as proof of my unreasonableness.
Perhaps the relationship had collapsed because he was not fit to manage it.
That possibility never gets a proper airing in Abbott’s statement. Instead, everything becomes behaviour. Every email becomes pressure. Every changed decision becomes a tactic. Then every expression of anger becomes another ingredient in his corporate shit-stew.
A Food Bank Became “Challenging Behaviour”
One of the bleakest passages in Michael Abbott’s statement concerns me saying I intended to visit a food bank in Cummins uniform and publish a photograph.
Abbott presented that as further evidence of unreasonable and challenging behaviour.
Of course he did.
A worker in a dispute about whether he should be paid mentions a food bank. The Senior HR Manager does not pause and ask how Cummins allowed the situation to get that far. He does not show curiosity. And he sure as shit does not show concern.
He files it under conduct.
That is the whole fucking problem in miniature.
Cummins had an employee whose health had deteriorated, whose absence position had become a maze, whose pay was disputed, whose trust in HR had been pulverised and whose communications had become increasingly frantic.
Michael Abbott saw the frantic bit and wrote it down as evidence.
He heard the machine rattle. Then he decided the rattle was trying to sabotage the machine.
His Stress Counted. Mine Became Evidence.
Abbott ended his witness statement by saying that dealing with me was enormously stressful. He said he had never encountered anybody so difficult in more than 12 years of HR.
I am sure he found it stressful. Being challenged by somebody who will not quietly swallow the corporate sludge can be exhausting.
However, look at the double standard.
When Michael Abbott felt stress, it became evidence that he had suffered through an exceptionally difficult employee. When I was signed off with anxiety, depression and work-related stress, my distress became behaviour.
It became email volume. Then became tone. Then it became indecision. It became an Occupational Health question. It became material for a Capability Review.
One man’s stress was human. Mine became diagnostic.
That is why Michael Abbott’s statement reads so badly now. It does not make him look like the calm adult who arrived to restore order. Instead, it shows a senior Cummins HR manager who saw an employee in distress and tried to turn the fallout into a case against him.
The company had my breakdown.
Michael Abbott tried to weaponise it.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Source Material Held By TCAP
- Michael Abbott witness statement, Newcastle Employment Tribunal, case 2501831/2022.
- Email correspondence between Michael Abbott and me, 5 December 2022 to 23 January 2023.
- Final Occupational Health referral issued by Michael Abbott on 20 January 2023.