At a normal company, a manager who claims reasonable suspicion that an employee may be impaired, demands a drug-and-alcohol test, then lets that employee drive out through the gate without arranging the required taxi would face some fairly obvious questions.
At Cummins, apparently, he gets an HES Team Manager job.
Health. Environment. Safety.
You could not write that in a sitcom without somebody from the BBC asking you to tone it down because nobody would believe a corporation that fucking ridiculous existed.
Neil McCaughtrie is now publicly listed as a Cummins HES Team Manager. That would be an entirely unremarkable career update if he had not previously been central to the drug-and-alcohol intervention documented by TCAP.
The detail that turns it from ordinary workplace bullshit into a corporate farce is beautifully simple.
The taxi never came.
Reasonable Suspicion, Apparently Optional
Cummins’ justification for demanding a for-cause drug-and-alcohol test had to be reasonable suspicion.
That phrase matters. It is not decorative HR wallpaper. You either genuinely suspect somebody is impaired or you do not. If you do, you act as though you believe there may be a safety risk. If you do not, you should not be waving a drug-test procedure around like a managerial truncheon.
I refused the test.
Cummins’ procedure required McCaughtrie to arrange a taxi. That was the point. If he genuinely believed I might be impaired, I should not have been driving anywhere. Not home. Not around the corner. And not through the gate and onto public roads.
No taxi was called.
Instead, McCaughtrie waved me off into the car park. I got into my own vehicle and drove out through the gate.
There it is. The entire fucking absurdity, sitting in the open.
A safety procedure is not a tapas menu. You do not order the dramatic starter, “I think this employee may be impaired”, then skip the boring main course, “make sure he does not drive away”.
You do not pull a fire alarm, watch somebody wander back into the burning building and later congratulate yourself on your commitment to evacuation policy.
Two Routes, Both Embarrassing
Cummins has two possible explanations. Each one makes the HES appointment look like a practical joke conducted by people who had misplaced the off switch.
The first is that McCaughtrie genuinely held reasonable suspicion that I was impaired.
Fine. Then he put me, other road users, the public and Cummins itself at risk by failing to arrange the taxi and allowing me to drive away. Had there been an accident, the company would have had an absolutely magnificent chronology to explain:
Reasonable suspicion.
Drug-test demand.
Test refusal.
No taxi.
Employee waved into car park.
Employee drives out through the gate.
That is not merely bad management. That is a risk-shaped hole in the company’s own safety process. The kind of hole through which liability, regulatory attention and reputational damage can march in wearing steel-toe boots.
Most companies would investigate it. Most companies would ask what the manager believed, why he believed it and why he then behaved as though none of it mattered.
Cummins, as ever, seems to have looked at the smoking crater and said: “Nothing to see here. Give him a safety job.”
The second explanation is that there was never genuine reasonable suspicion at all.
In that case, the taxi was not called because no one actually believed I was unsafe to drive. The test demand becomes something else: a bullying intervention, an assertion of authority or a process weaponised against an employee who did not fall into line quickly enough.
Either McCaughtrie failed to manage a serious safety risk or he used a safety process as a fucking prop.
There is no flattering third option. “I thought he might be impaired, but I could not be arsed with the next step” is not a defence. It is HR cosplay.
Accountability, Cummins Style
This is where the story stops being only about one manager and becomes another exhibit in Cummins’ accountability museum.
At most companies, a procedure exists to create a trail of responsibility. Something goes wrong, somebody asks why, evidence gets examined and lessons get learned. The system may not be perfect, but it at least pretends that outcomes matter.
Cummins’ version appears to run backwards.
A complaint goes in. The company investigates itself. The company clears itself. The people involved remain in place. Then, eventually, somebody gets a shinier role with “Safety” printed on it.
That is not accountability. It is a malfunctioning vending machine. Insert serious concern, press the button and receive a managerial promotion.
If McCaughtrie genuinely believed I posed a safety risk, he put Cummins at risk by failing to follow its own procedure. If he did not believe it, he put Cummins at risk by abusing a drug-and-alcohol process against an employee.
Most companies would see either version as something requiring scrutiny.
Cummins saw HES potential.
Health, Environment And Safety, Apparently
The job title is the punchline.
HES. Health, Environment and Safety.
The word Safety now sits beside McCaughtrie’s name like a fresh coat of paint on a cracked bulkhead. It is impossible not to notice the taxi-shaped hole underneath it.
Perhaps HES has a new internal meaning at Cummins:
Hope Everyone Shrugs.
That would at least fit the evidence.
A company does not need to be perfect. People make mistakes. Managers get things wrong. Procedures are missed. The point of accountability is what happens next.
Do you examine the failure? Ask difficult questions? Do you protect the people who may have been harmed? Do you ensure the same manager understands the procedure before giving him greater responsibility?
Or do you run the complaint through the corporate washing machine, hand the manager a new title and pray nobody remembers the bit where the allegedly impaired employee drove out through the gate because nobody had bothered to call a taxi?
Only a company as spectacularly ridiculous as Cummins could take that sequence and land on HES Team Manager.
The taxi never came.
The accountability never arrived either.
But the promotion did.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Related Read – Cummins Confidential : Neil McCaughtrie – Bully or Grossly Negligent? (Or “Sweep Under Carpet”?)