Cummins Confidential : The Golden Gun - The Cummins Accountability Project

Cummins thinks if it collects enough shiny badges from governments and charities, it can point at the lanyard and yell “ethical” until everyone forgets what it actually does. The latest trinket is a UK Ministry of Defence Gold Employer Recognition Scheme award for “supporting the armed forces community”, pushed into the local lapdogs, sorry, press like it proves TCAP wrong.

It does not. It proves exactly what we have been saying – guilty bastards covering their tracks with awards.

How To Get A Gold Halo

The Defence Employer Recognition Scheme is not some mystical honour handed down by the troops. It is a Ministry of Defence brand programme with three neat tiers – Bronze, Silver, Gold. Employers sign the Armed Forces Covenant, then nominate themselves for an award and send in evidence that they “pledge, demonstrate or advocate” support for service people and families.

Tick the boxes, show you have reservist policies, talk up your advocacy, and you are in the running. It is bureaucracy, not sainthood. If you are good at PowerPoint and HR policy templates, you can climb the ladder from Bronze to Silver to Gold without anyone ever asking how you behave when a disabled worker melts down or a veteran gets in the way of your headcount plan.

Cummins knows the game. They picked up Silver in 2024, immediately started talking about “the journey to Gold”, and spent a year tuning the paperwork. Result: in 2025 they get Gold and a government logo to hang next to all the other paid and self-awarded nonsense.

None of this disproves a single TCAP line. It just shows you how far they will go to build an expensive moral costume.

Gavin’s Gold-Washed Press Release

Enter the Northern Echo, stage left.

“Cummins in Darlington wins top honour for armed forces work”. New logo, same script. Quote the internal champions, mention Remembrance headcounts, stress how “fortunate” reservists feel to have such a supportive employer. Pretend this is a story about veterans, not a story about Cummins and the Ministry of Defence polishing each other.

The reporter cannot plead ignorance. TCAP has already handed him chapter and verse on Cummins buying ethics and disability awards, plus the tribunal history of the veteran they fired (they should remember, they printed the excuse. Not apology, excuse). He knows there is a second half to the story and runs the press copy anyway. That is not journalism. That is leaflet distribution.

Gold does not erase the veteran they binned when it suited them. It does not erase the disabled workers they dragged through tribunals. It just gives them a different paragraph to quote when anyone asks questions.

From Gold Logos To Half Billion Generator Deals

Now look at what is sitting in the same news cycle.

While Cummins UK is busy telling the Echo how much it loves the armed forces, Cummins Power Generation in Minneapolis quietly lands a $500 million firm fixed price contract with the US Army for 500 kW skid mounted mobile generator sets and power plants. Five years of military power kit, straight into the machine.

You are allowed to ask whether it is just a coincidence that they are being paraded as a model defence employer in one country while cashing a monster defence cheque in another. Nobody has to prove a formal pipeline between ERS Gold and that US Army contract for you to see the shape of the thing.

You decorate the company with covenants and badges. You roll them out in procurement slide decks. You reassure yourself, and your customer, that you are dealing with a “trusted partner” who loves veterans. Then you send the purchase order.

Gold As Sales Collateral, Not Conscience

If you think that is paranoid, read the trade blurbs.

Mission Automotive and the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders have already run webinars openly selling this model to other firms. Titles along the lines of:

“Cummins Case Study – ERS Gold & Defence Market Success”.
“How Armed Forces engagement strengthens talent, culture and procurement scoring”.

They are not even pretending this is a purely moral exercise. The pitch is simple – sign the Covenant, work your way up to Gold, then use it to look better on defence tenders. That is what Cummins is now a case study for.

It is not “we did the right thing and procurement followed”. It is “here is how we turned a covenant pledge into a competitive edge”. Exactly the behaviour you would expect from a company that treats awards as tactical kit, not as external judgment.

Awards As Alibi, Not Evidence

This is the part where they wave the Gold certificate and say:

“Look, we cannot possibly be what TCAP says we are. We support reservists. We host ceremonies. We got a letter from the Secretary of State. We are literally Gold.”

But awards of this sort do not test the things TCAP is talking about. ERS is scoped to:

do you employ and support reservists, veterans and cadet volunteers
do you give them leave, flexibility and visible backing
do you advocate to other employers

It does not:

dig through your employment tribunal record for disability and mental health cases
ask why you fired one veteran while hugging others for PR photos
weigh a half billion generator contract against your Clean Air Act fines and defeat device history
interview the people who crashed and burned under your processes

You can be an absolutely model employer to one subset of people and a catastrophe to others at the same time. Gold says “Cummins figured out how to please this particular scheme”. It does not say “TCAP is wrong”.

The Veteran They Fired And The Veteran They Parade

On another part of the internet, TCAP has already documented Cummins treatment of at least one veteran they did not turn into a case study. The one who ended up in a tribunal, not in a press shot. redundancy instead of being rolled out on Armed Forces Day.

That story sits next to the Remembrance piece where we took apart Cummins habit of using poppies as a prop while hand waving away the human cost of their decisions. These are not abstract themes. They are specific cases, with specific names, in the same country where Cummins now flashes a Gold covenant badge.

If the Ministry of Defence or local employers want to know where the truth lies, they should read that work, not just the press release.

Gold Does Not Wash Out Exhaust Fumes

Zoom out and the pattern is boringly familiar.

Defeat devices on diesel engines – record fines.
Disability inclusion “Best Place to Work” badges – perfect 100s on paper, broken lives underneath.
“World’s Most Ethical Companies” – pay to apply, fill your own forms, keep a seat warm in the brochure.
Now Armed Forces Gold – another logo, another scheme with a very narrow set of questions and an extremely useful output for your sales team.

You cannot bolt enough trophies onto this machine to change what it is. At some point, you stop asking whether the awards are meaningful and start asking why they need so many.

If the company was truly what its badges claim, it would not be spending so much effort proving it.

The Most Honestly Procured Awards Award

So no, Gavin. No, Cummins. No, Ministry of Defence. A Gold ERS badge does not “prove” TCAP wrong. It proves you are very diligent at filling in the right forms and being seen in the right rooms while other parts of your behaviour go unexamined.

TCAP expects a new category next year:

“The Most Honestly Procured Awards Award – Platinum”.

Criteria:

did not apply for the award themselves
did not pay a fee to be considered
did not turn the badge into a sales slide
did not use it as a shield against criticism from people they have harmed

Cummins will not be on that shortlist. They can keep piling up Gold on the lanyard if it helps them sleep. The rest of us will keep looking at what they do when the cameras are not rolling.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project