Michael Bloomberg admits his presidential campaign used prison labour

Relationship with outside contractor ended as revelation made public

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has admitted his presidential campaign made use of prison labour to make calls to potential voters on his behalf.

The former New York mayor, who is among those seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination to challenge for the presidency in 2020, said his campaign was unaware the calls being made by a company contracted by the 77-year, were being carried out by prison inmates.

It said once it was made aware of the arrangement, it ended its relationship with the company.

“We didn’t know about this and we never would have allowed it if we had,” Bloomberg spokesperson Julie Wood told The Intercept, which was the first to report the news.

“We don’t believe in this practice and we’ve now ended our relationship with the subcontractor in question.”

The website said that through a third-party vendor, Mr Bloomberg’s campaign contracted New Jersey-based call centre company ProCom, which runs calls centres in New Jersey and Oklahoma.

It said two of the call centres in Oklahoma were operated out of state prisons. In at least one of the two prisons, incarcerated people were contracted to make calls on behalf of the Bloomberg campaign, it said.

Alex Friedmann, managing editor of Prison Legal News and an advocate for prisoners’ rights, told the website: “The use of prison labour is the continued exploitation of people who are locked up, who really have virtually no other opportunities to have employment or make money other than the opportunities given to them by prison officials.”

Mr Bloomberg has made a late entry to the 2020 presidential race, skipping the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, and instead spending millions of dollars of his own money on television advertising campaigns in states that vote later.

Reuters said that Mr Bloomberg, ranked by Forbes as the eighth-richest American, had spent more on campaign adverts in the last few weeks than his main Democratic rivals had all year.

Despite that, he has so far failed to crack into the top tier of candidates in public opinion polls, which remains dominated by Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg.

A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll conducted on December 18-19 showed about five per cent Democratic-leaning voters supported the billionaire former mayor.

Additional reporting by Reuters