Ice Industries does metal stamping. It also, on the public record, manages to stamp on just about everything else that should matter in a workplace – safety, equality, basic human dignity. Cummins loves them. Hands them awards. Poses for photos. Puts them in “diverse supplier” spotlights like a halo factory.

You look at the brochure and you get “service-disabled veteran-owned”, “reliable partner”, “quality”, all that corporate incense. You look at the actual history and you get amputations, discrimination allegations, toxic vapours, and workers describing the place like a punishment detail. Cummins saw all that and said “perfect, get them on the engine line”. Of course they did.

The Cummins Connection: Polished Plaques, Dirty Hands

Ice Industries is not some vague “indirect supplier”. They are in the Cummins tent with a lanyard on.

Their own PR spells it out: from Mason, Ohio through to Monterrey, Mexico, Ice has been feeding parts into Cummins engines and filtration kits for years. When another supplier wobbled on B-Series engine parts, Ice stepped in and took over oil pan production, getting fawned over by Cummins for pulling off a “tight-timeline” rescue.

In 2021, Cummins handed Ice a North America “Best Delivery” award. Later, they stuck them in a Diverse Supplier Spotlight and made a song and dance about Ice being a service-disabled veteran-owned small business. The message: look how wholesome our supply chain is. Look at this patriotic little metal-basher helping us build the future.

Behind that photo-op, the picture is uglier. Because if Cummins had bothered to read beyond the press release, they would have seen exactly what sort of outfit they were propping up. Or they did read it and just did not give a shit. Both options are entirely believable.

Amputations and OSHA Loyalty Points

Let’s start in Grenada, Mississippi – the plant now under Ice’s banner. In 2011 OSHA turned up there under its national emphasis programme on amputations, which is not a club you want to be in. They didn’t arrive by accident. A worker had already lost part of themselves to the machinery.

Inspectors walked the floor and found 26 violations. Twenty-six. Unguarded machines, crap lockout/tagout, the usual industrial horror show where the press lines are treated like arcade machines rather than devices that can maim you in half a second. They proposed six-figure fines. For Ice, it was the price of doing business. For the worker, it was a permanent souvenir of somebody else’s cost-cutting.

The following year OSHA was back again. More violations. More penalties. If this were a coffee shop, Ice would have filled its stamp card and earned a free inspection. Instead, they carried on, expanded, and kept picking up work.

Meanwhile, Cummins was pinning a “Best Delivery” badge on them. Best delivery of what, exactly – parts or incident reports? When you are Cummins, apparently you can shout about “Destination Zero” out one side of your mouth and feed money to a supplier with an amputation record out the other.

Breathing the Wrong Kind of Vapour

Grenada has another party trick: the land itself is poisoned.

Long before Ice turned up, the site had been used and abused by a line of manufacturers who treated solvents like holy water. Trichloroethene, vinyl chloride, hexavalent chromium, benzene – pick a carcinogen, chances are it had been through the place. By the late eighties the EPA was involved. By the mid-2010s they were warning about vapour intrusion – fumes rising from contaminated groundwater into buildings.

In 2017, federal investigators told workers that levels of TCE inside parts of the plant were high enough to trigger concern. That is the polite version. The real version is “congratulations, you’ve been breathing something that can help you grow tumours you never asked for”. The site is now on the Superfund priority list. Remediation, fact sheets, angry neighbours – the whole grim circus.

Ice did not create that original mess. But they chose to set up shop on top of it and carry on stamping parts for Cummins while people inside and outside the plant worried about the air. A “diverse supplier” running presses in a vapour box. It is like holding a wellness conference in the smoking area.

Cummins will talk for hours about ESG, resilience, sustainability. Then they buy from a plant sitting in a cloud of someone else’s chemical hangover and expect nobody to notice the hypocrisy.

Who Gets Hired Back and Who Gets Left at the Gate

Now the discrimination piece. Because of course there is one.

Back in the early 2000s, when Deerfield Manufacturing sat in the family tree that Ice would later hoover up, an African-American forklift operator called Maurice Allen took them to federal court. He said that after he went off with an injury and a workers’ comp claim, he tried to come back. Suddenly the door was shut. White applicants got hired. He did not. He called it what it looked like to him: race discrimination and disability discrimination.

The company’s HR manager was named in the case. The court threw out some peripheral claims but refused to bin the core discrimination allegations because there were factual disputes that had to be heard properly. That’s judge-speak for “something here smells off and we can’t just sweep it away.”

Fast-forward and Ice controls the Deerfield operation. The case doesn’t magically vanish from history because the logo on the sign changed. It’s part of the DNA. You can see echoes of it today in the worker reviews: complaints about favouritism, being treated like “convicts and uneducated labourers”, HR that feels more like a weapon than a support function.

And Cummins? They know this tune.

This is the company that ended up in front of an Employment Tribunal in Mohammed v Cummins Ltd, where a long-serving machinist with anxiety and depression was dismissed after travelling to Pakistan while off sick. The Tribunal originally found discrimination arising from disability and unfair dismissal. Cummins appealed on technical points and got a re-run, but the underlying story is still a disabled worker being handled like a problem, not a person.

In the US, Cummins Power Generation got hit by the EEOC after refusing to hire an applicant because accomodating his Marfan syndrome and related conditions would be too much faff. They paid and promised to do better. Cummins also shelled out in a pay case after underpaying a woman doing the same job as a man. TCAP has covered it all: the pay gaps, the disability cases, my own tribunal journey where the glossy “inclusion” speeches disintegrated the moment it reached HR and Legal.

So when Cummins wraps Ice Industries in a little “diverse supplier” bow, it’s perfect. A company with discrimination allegations in its history feeding a company with discrimination findings and settlements in its own. Corporate birds of a feather fucking over the same kinds of people.

Workers Speak, Management Shrugs

You do not have to trawl legal databases to see what sort of place Ice runs. The people clocking in have been spelling it out for years.

Reviews talk about “unsafe work conditions and bad management”. About HR that does not listen. About “a disaster” of a plant where nobody seems to know what they are doing but the line has to keep moving regardless. One reviewer basically said the quiet part out loud: this is a “laid back low production plant for 2nd chance convicts and uneducated laborers”. Translation: leadership sees the workforce as lucky to be there, so shut up, take the risk, and be grateful you’ve got a job.

That is how you get amputations and vapour scares and OSHA citations. That is how you end up on Superfund timelines. That is how you end up in federal discrimination litigation. Not by accident. By culture. By treating people as consumables.

Cummins either does not read this stuff or reads it and decides the margin is worth more than the limbs. Every “Best Delivery Award” photo with Ice is Cummins saying “we see you, and we approve”.

Cummins’ House, Cummins’ Neighbours

None of this lives in a vacuum.

Cummins has spent the last few years lurching from a record-breaking emissions cheating settlement to pay and disability cases while still acting like the moral adult in the room. They fling out Remembrance Day PR fluff and inclusion posters while tribunal and EEOC documents read like an HR horror anthology.

Now look at their supplier chain: Ice Industries with its amputation history, discrimination allegations, toxic site, piss-poor reviews. NN, Inc. with its own securities and safety baggage. The bus makers. The battery partners. Over and over the same pattern: anyone who can keep the parts flowing and the story tidy gets a seat at the table. What happens to the humans underneath that table is an acceptable loss.

Ice Industries is not a random outlier. It is a symptom. It shows you what Cummins is willing to tolerate – and reward – as long as the schedule is met.

So yes, this is a Supplier Series piece. But it is also another mirror held up to Cummins. If you are proud of this chain, you own every fucked-up link in it.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Supplier Series : Ice Industries – Melting Safety, Equality, and Decency in Cummins’ Dirty Supply Chain