Cummins’s latest equality story comes with more than 350 employees, over 40 activities and a future full of possibilities. In its 12 November International Day of the Girl article, Cummins describes mentoring, leadership workshops and engineering experiences to help girls imagine what they might become. These are worthwhile things. A girl discovering that she could design an engine deserves every opportunity to pursue it.
The company presenting the story, however, also supplied the employment lawyer who dealt with me. His name is Rayner Jones, and his own website offers a rather different lesson in the value of equality. That is where the uplifting music encounters the accounts department, and where my patience with Cummins DEI PR starts to run out.
Rayner Jones And The Word He Chose
The Rayner Jones case-studies page invites prospective clients to consider a simple question: “How much could you save?”. Among its examples is work for an unnamed freight company facing unfair dismissal and race discrimination claims at the Bristol Employment Tribunal. The website says the firm secured the dismissal of the unfair dismissal claim. It then boasts that it “settled the race claim cheaply”.
Read that last word slowly. A race discrimination claim now sits in the shop window, and the firm puts the price on the display label. The page tells us nothing about the underlying allegation, the claimant’s experience or why the parties agreed the settlement. It shows prospective employers a financial result and encourages them to imagine enjoying something similar.
What a miserable little fucking sales pitch. There were countless ways to describe resolving a dispute. Jones’s business chose to advertise the saving. I call him Rancid Rayner; that is my assessment of the presentation. The adjective that makes the presentation so revealing belongs entirely to his website.
The Cummins Lawyer In My Inbox
My correspondence from the 2023 employment tribunal proceedings against Cummins records Rayner Jones’s role. His emails came from a Cummins address and identified him as an “Employment Lawyer Secondee” at Cummins Ltd. He dealt with the preparation of the case, including the list of issues, disclosure and hearing documents.
That matters because I encountered the website while dealing with the man whose services Cummins used against me. On 21 August 2023, I wrote to him: “Congratulations on settling the race case cheaply”. In the same email, I explained that I had a mental health condition and needed sufficient time to prepare without becoming overwhelmed.
On 20 September, I challenged the website wording again. I asked whether I should assume that someone advertising this achievement had arrived to put right the conduct I complained about. By then, I already had a clear sense of his priorities. Readers can see why a later Cummins equality announcement might struggle to bring a tear of gratitude to my eye.
£15,000, Then £30,000
Cummins initially offered me £15,000 through Jones. I rejected it and made a counter-offer. Cummins then came back with £30,000. I rejected that too. Those were proposals from Cummins to settle my case, and I considered them inadequate.
For me, the dispute concerned my treatment, my health and accountability for decisions that had affected my life. I judged any proposed payment against those things. The figure did not acquire moral authority simply because a large company chose to put it on the table. Nor did doubling it answer the questions that had brought me into the proceedings.
So when Cummins puts on its benevolent corporate face, I remember the other conversation. I remember trying to explain what had happened to me while discussing figures that could bring the case to an end. I remember the lawyer whose business promoted a low-cost race-claim settlement. That experience informs my contempt for their publicity. It is considerably more substantial than waking up one morning and deciding that diversity sounds like a load of bollocks.
Why Cummins DEI PR is a Piss-Take
Let me make my position plain. I support diversity, equity and inclusion. Women should have opportunities in engineering. Employers should treat racial minorities fairly. Disabled workers should have the support and adjustments they need. People should have the freedom to challenge mistreatment without an employer treating them as an inconvenience to resolve at minimum expense.
My criticism of Cummins DEI PR comes from taking those principles seriously. When equality and money pull in different directions, my experience of Cummins is that the money wins. Cummins gives the principle a stirring introduction, then asks it to wait outside while the business attends to its financial interests. That is the choice I want to examine: what happens when respecting the promise carries a cost the business would rather avoid?
A mentoring event is easy to celebrate. There is an activity to photograph, a message to approve and a positive story to circulate. A worker challenging the company is harder work. They may dispute management’s account, demand documents and refuse the sum the company offered to end their case. Inclusion becomes a more demanding proposition when the person you claim to include keeps saying something inconvenient.
This is where the corporate performance becomes a piss-take. The company wants credit for its sensitivity to inequality. Meanwhile, it expects people on the receiving end of its legal approach to admire the same polished moral portrait. I have seen enough of the paperwork to decline that invitation. Cummins DEI PR does not get a free pass here merely because its subject is something I believe in.
Diversity On The Global Cost Sheet
The company’s international footprint deserves the same scrutiny. Cummins operates across economies with very different costs, opportunities and distributions of power. A multinational workforce can make an excellent diversity photograph. The photograph tells us remarkably little about who captures the value of the work.
Cummins has explained the commercial calculation itself. Its 2007 annual report described global procurement from “lower cost countries such as China, India and Brazil” as part of its cost-reduction efforts. It said those efforts had substantially cut the amount it paid for materials and services. The same report discussed controlling research and development costs partly through significant analysis work at its technical centre in India.
The company’s 2025 annual report explains manufacturing joint ventures through commercial objectives too: reaching markets, reducing capital spending, improving supply-chain management and developing technology. The company gives investors these explanations about how the business works. They deserve a place beside the more flattering story it tells about its place in society.
Who Gets The Value?
Here is the question for the developing-markets publicity: how much power and value reach the people whose work makes the commercial advantage possible? A production line can contain people of many backgrounds while the terms remain firmly in the employer’s favour. Representation alone does not tell us about bargaining power, security or the ability to challenge the boss.
My suspicion is that this is where a good deal of corporate diversity rhetoric earns its keep: making a commercial relationship look like a moral gift. Workers become evidence of the company’s generosity, while the financial benefit of employing or sourcing from them receives a different presentation for a different audience. The people supplying the work deserve rather more than the grateful supporting roles a company gives them in its annual report.
That is the wider irony behind the word on Jones’s website. Across very different transactions, the attraction of getting something for less can sit comfortably beside grand language about valuing people. A cheap outcome is an achievement in the commercial account. Whether the person at the other end received fair value is a separate and much harder question.
Equality When The Bill Arrives
The girls in Cummins’s latest article deserve useful opportunities, and the employees giving their time deserve recognition for their work. We should also judge those efforts on their own merits. They cannot answer every question about the company that publishes the photographs.
Cummins DEI PR asks the public to associate the business with fairness. My experience gives me reasons to interrogate that association. I want to know what those values require when a worker challenges management, when a worker refuses the proposed exit price and when acting fairly might leave the company with less money. That is where a principle has something to prove.
Cummins can keep telling us what it values. I will keep looking at what happens when the bill arrives. Having dealt with its chosen negotiator, I find the corporate sermon a little hard to fucking swallow.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project