Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg’s campaign hired a contractor that used prison labor to make phone calls for the former New York mayor’s White House bid.<\/p>\n
The Intercept first reported<\/a> that ProCom, a New Jersey-based company hired by the Bloomberg campaign through a third-party vendor, operates two call centers out of state prisons in Oklahoma. In at least one of those prisons \u2014 a minimum-security women’s prison outside of Tulsa \u2014 inmates were contracted to make calls on behalf of the candidate, The Intercept reported.<\/p>\n Stu Loeser, a longtime spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that the prison labor had been used by, as he put it, “a vendor of a vendor of a vendor.”<\/p>\n “We didn’t know about it and we never would have allowed it. We don’t believe in this practice and we immediately stopped working with ProCom and the people who hired them,” Loeser said in a tweet.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The campaign said The Intercept’s inquiry alerted the billionaire’s presidential team to the fact that ProCom had been used to make calls for the campaign.<\/p>\n “We do not support this practice and we are making sure our vendors more properly vet their subcontractors moving forward,” the campaign said in a statement.<\/p>\n Bloomberg himself tweeted out the statement.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Bloomberg was a late entrant into the 2020 Democratic primary but has risen somewhat in the polls amid a multimillion-dollar advertising blitz<\/a>. According to a Real Clear Politics national polling average, Bloomberg is at 5% behind former Vice President Joe Biden, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.<\/p>\n