Wayne Anderson entered the witness box with something better than evidence served in advance: a private experiment, an appprently true, unserved trundle wheel. Employment Judge Sweeney apparently, was willing to swallow the result whole. My Mam’s statement could be pushed aside over a missing signature. Cummins, meanwhile, could produce fresh measurements from the witness stand and watch them harden into judicial fact.
The Witness-Box Delivery
Anderson’s written statement already took a casual swipe at the distance between Hot Test and the toilets. At paragraph 21, he said Long Block Team 4 was “no more than 30 seconds difference in walking time” from Hot Test. No measurement appeared. There was no date, route, map, timing sheet, photograph, video, witness or fucking trundle record.
Then Anderson reached the witness stand.
The detailed exercise did not arrive in the bundle. It was not served the previous week. Cummins did not even produce it earlier that morning so I could look at it before Anderson gave evidence. The numbers arrived while he was on the stand, when the opportunity to inspect the route, examine any record or obtain competing evidence had already been sealed inside the factory.
According to the written reasons, Anderson had become curious about the debate and taken it upon himself to measure the journey with a trundle. What a lovely piece of spontaneous corporate fieldwork. No disclosure. Zero scrutiny. Just Wando, his wheel and a result delivered hot to the bench.
Thirty Per Cent Disguised As 23 Seconds
Anderson’s exercise produced two times. Hot Test station 1 to the toilets allegedly took one minute 16 seconds. Headline on Team 4 allegedly took one minute 39 seconds. There’s no evidence to suggest the numbers were real. They were just accepted as such, like most of the Respondent’s evidence (like the 3 month old spelling correction”).
Sweeney reduced the difference to “approximately 23 seconds” and accepted Anderson’s evidence. Framing it that way makes the gap sound like loose change found behind a sofa. The arithmetic says something rather less convenient.
Ninety-nine seconds is approximately 30.3% longer than 76 seconds.
Even if True
Even if Anderson’s figures were true, which I consider highly unlikely, his own exercise confirmed that the Team 4 journey took nearly a third longer than the chosen Hot Test journey. This mattered because Occupational Health had recommended that I work close to toilet facilities and be able to reach them at short notice. We were not comparing the queue for a fucking coffee machine. The adjustment concerned unpredictable bowel symptoms.
What percentage increase was Sweeney medically qualified to decide could not make a meaningful difference? Would 35% have counted? Forty? Fifty? Where was the clinical threshold, and which medical evidence supplied it? Did he want to conduct some evidence where I made repeated trips until I eventually shit myself?
Which section of the Bar exam covers appropriate toilet distances for a worker with unpredictable bowel symptoms? Was that before contract law or after the specialist module on turning an unserved factory experiment into medical fact?
Cummins already had Occupational Health advice that I should work close to the toilets and be able to reach them at short notice. If Anderson’s figures meant that agreed adjustment was not actually in place on Team 4, why did the company not ask its own Occupational Health provider for a specific safe distance or journey time? Alternatively, if Cummins genuinely believed 99 seconds remained “close”, why not ask the clinician to confirm it? If there was not agreement in place, why concern himself with the measurement in the first place? Slow day at the office and a random trundle laid around (like they tend to) make a lightbulb go off?
Instead, a manager supplied the distance, the tribunal supplied the medical significance and Occupational Health was left outside the room where the clinical question belonged. No clinical evidence supplied Sweeney’s threshold.
The Route Nobody Could Test
The written reasons say Anderson used the designated walkway and started at Hot Test station 1, the nearest Hot Test point to the toilets. That choice immediately raises questions. Why use the nearest point as the comparator? A fair exercise would have recorded every Hot Test station, the ordinary position where I worked or a representative average. And from which position on team 4 did he consider the “start line”, in this exercise that definitely happened.
Traffic conditions also vanished from the exercise. Was production running? Did workers cross the route? Could pallets, tools, trolleys or other factory obstructions affect the journey? Nobody knows whether Anderson walked at his normal working pace, marched for the clock or performed the managerial power-walk of a man who knew which result would help Cummins.
The raw measurements from the trundle were never shown. No contemporaneous notes appeared. Nothing established who timed him, whether he timed himself, how many attempts he made or whether Cummins quietly buried any run that produced a less useful result.
This was not evidence tested in daylight. It was a factory anecdote wearing a high-visibility vest.
The Paradox Sweeney Built
Sweeney’s logic then creates a self-defeating paradox. He noted that Anderson began at Hot Test station 1, the nearest Hot Test point to the toilets. The written reasons added that some upper Hot Test stations might take longer to reach than Team 4. That observation was supposed to help Cummins. Instead, it blows a hole through the finding.
If the nearest Hot Test position represented the agreed adjustment, then Team 4 was approximately 30.3% longer and the move mattered. Conversely, if other Hot Test stations were as far away as, or farther away than, Team 4, simply assigning me to Hot Test did not guarantee that I was working “close to the toilet facilities” at all. Some team 4 stations could have extended the non-trivial measurement too. Did he consider that? Or was he so angry I’d dared to challenged him in a complaint that shouldn’t have been shown to him, that he was only interested in what he viewed as damaging theoretical?
Either the precise workstation mattered or Cummins had no reliable location-based adjustment in place. Comparing one potentially unsuitable station with another cannot establish that either was medically suitable. It only proves that distances across the work areas varied and that somebody needed to define which positions met the Occupational Health recommendation.
Sweeney used that variation to conclude there was never any need to agree that I would not be moved to Team 4. His own reasoning points the other way. The more the journey varied between stations, the greater the need for a clear, specific and clinically informed placement.
The Site Visit Cummins Refused
I tried to arrange a site visir after the hearing, on two occasions, to verify the supposed findings. If production access presented a problem, I was willing to attend outside production hours. The point was simple: show the route, repeat the exercise and let the evidence breathe outside Wayne Anderson’s mouth.
That request was initially ignored, then after a second email, refused.
Cummins therefore enjoyed the perfect arrangement. Its manager could conduct a private experiment on premises it controlled, reveal the result only while giving evidence and then deny me access to check it. The tribunal did not treat that sequence as a reason for caution. Sweeney accepted it.
If the measurement was so reliable, why prevent verification? A route that proved Cummins right should have left no reason to keep the gate shut. Any company confident in its evidence does not need to guard a fucking walkway like the Crown Jewels.
If no agreement ever existed, why measure it at all? Bizarre. If no agreement ever existed, why my polite email to Holly Palram raising the isssue and a willingness to resolve informallly? Bizarre.
My Mam Needed A Signature
Now place that indulgence beside the treatment of my mam’s evidence.
The written reasons record that I asked the tribunal to read an unsigned and undated statement from my mother, Tracy Morganm placed into a supplementary bundle. I was unaware that they was permitted so asked my mother to recalled what she overheard at the SAL3 meeting and included it in a supplementary bundle. Sweeney was outraged when he noticed… until I pointed out Anthony Cook’s statement for the respondent in the main bundle. Errrr, errrrr well it’s not signed or dated. Oh he changed the excuse. I could have had her sign and date it. Nobody requested that straightforward correction.
Cummins faced no demand for a trundle methodology. It was Wando and his trundle after all, known to measure accurately within a few atoms. Advance service was apparently unnecessary for Anderson’s detailed measurements. Yet my mam’s evidence, served before the hearing and not on the back of my hand in bio, encountered a fucking border checkpoint because ink was missing from the bottom.
The Wayne Anderson statement supplied to TCAP for this review also ends with empty signature and date lines. Apparently blank lines become fatal when they belong to my witness and scenery when they sit beneath a Cummins manager’s declaration.
That is not a level playing field. It is a loading dock tilted towards the company.
Wando’s Convenient Memory
Anderson’s statement carries other little pieces of courtroom convenience. He said he could not remember any mention of me frequently helping on Team 4. However, he confidently remembered me saying the toilet distance was “fine”. Forget the point that hurt Cummins. Preserve the sentence that helped it. Corporate memory is a remarkable instrument when played by solicitors.
“Hi, are you Wayne? I’m Lee. Impressive toilet distances from here aren’t they!?” That’s how a lot of my conversations went. I got particularly existed the closer I was as that meant any toilet trips wouldn’t hurt my production outputs as much (my second highest priority at Cummins, output volume).
He also claimed that he had not spoken to me alone. That was untrue. Anderson came over, introduced himself and told me about his upcoming knee surgery. It was a direct, personal exchange and the unnecessary detail is precisely why I remember it.
His own written statement is hardly a monument to consistency either. Paragraph 10 says we first met “via zoom” at the SAL 3 meeting. Seven paragraphs later, the same meeting supposedly took place “by phone”. Paragraph 48 then says he spoke to me personally about taking toilet breaks. Zoom, phone, never alone, personally. Pick a lane, Wando. Preferably measure it first. It was on the phone and not alone. It was with Gemma Penk. I’m wondering if a “for cause” drug screening for Wando might might apt at this point. Especially given he was expected to handle a trundle in a straight line.
The Wage Papers Arrived Late Too
Anderson’s trundle was not the only item to wander into proceedings after the evidential table should have been set.
The written reasons record that Cummins applied at the hearing to add a July 2022 payslip and a related pay document to the bundle. They also record that I ultimately did not object. Fair enough. My non-objection does not explain why a global company with an HR department, payroll systems and professional representation failed to produce relevant wage evidence earlier.
Why did those documents arrive only when the hearing was under way? Nothing explains why late evidence from Cummins was repeatedly treated as a manageable addition while my mam’s statement was discounted over a signature that nobody asked me to obtain.
One side received practical indulgence. The other got procedural austerity with a judicial sneer stapled to it. Why wasn’t Sweeney talking these questions. Oh that’s right, I complained at his failure to, you know, do his job.
Sweeney’s Non-Scientific Truth Machine
The written reasons perform the final trick in three short paragraphs. First, they narrate Anderson’s private trundle exercise. Next, they concede that it was “not scientific”. Finally, Sweeney accepts it and uses it to find that there was “no substantial difference” in distance.
That is fucking astonishing.
Evidence can be unserved, unrecorded, unrepeatable and expressly non-scientific, yet still become truth if it rolls in from the Cummins side of the room. Meanwhile, the statement of a claimant’s mother can be pushed down the evidential hierarchy because the judge would rather catalogue a missing signature than ask for one.
The asymmetry is cleaner here than almost anywhere else in the written reasons. Cummins (a common tactic in cases involving Wendy Miller KC), delivered an ambush and received a finding of fact. I delivered a statement and got a stationery inspection.
Anderson’s own numbers showed a 30.3% longer journey. Sweeney made the percentage disappear, christened 23 seconds insignificant and never explained the medical basis for doing so. My request to inspect the route went nowhere. No trundle record appeared because there was no trundle record in evidence to examine.
The trundle did not make the bundle.
It made the judgment.
Seamus, consider retirement. Wando’s trundle has already carried your credibility farther than it was built to travel. Perhaps Mcdonald’s would suit. But that would require handing out brown paper packages.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Employment Tribunal Written Reasons – Mr L Thompson v Cummins Ltd, Case 2501831/2022
- Witness Statement of Wayne Anderson – Case 2501831/2022, supplied case document
- Occupational Health report dated 31 March 2022 – cited at paragraph 15 of Anderson’s statement and paragraph 49 of the written reasons