Michael Bloomberg relied on prison labour to staff presidential campaign

Billionaire US presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg used prison labour to make calls for his campaign, investigative website The Intercept reported on Tuesday.

Bloomberg called the report “fundamentally accurate” and said his campaign had already ended its relationship with the company involved.

The Intercept reported that the former New York mayor’s campaign contracted, through a third-party vendor, the ProCom call centre company based in New Jersey.

ProCom runs call centres in New Jersey as well as Oklahoma, where two of its call centres operate from state prisons, The Intercept said.

In at least one of those Oklahoma prisons, a minimum-security women’s facility, inmates were contracted to make calls on behalf of the Bloomberg campaign, according to the report.