Pete Buttigieg pushed back on suggestions that his work at consulting firm McKinsey & Company was related to illegal schemes and mass layoffs.
“The proposition that I’ve been on front lines of corporate price fixing is bullshit,” Buttigieg, 37, said in an interview published Thursday. “I worked for a consulting company that had a client that may have been involved in fixing or was apparently in a scandal. I was not aware of the Canadian bread pricing scandal until last night.”
The Democratic presidential candidate and former South Bend, Indiana, mayor worked at McKinsey from 2007 to 2010. Due to a nondisclosure agreement, Buttigieg was barred from releasing the names of the clients he worked for at McKinsey until the company lifted the restriction in December.
Among his clients was the Canadian Loblaw’s grocery store chain, which in 2017 admitted to participating in a 14-year scheme to fix prices in order to increase the cost of packaged bread.
Buttigieg said that he did not analyze the price of bread in any detail. “Basically the way my job worked was, they have about 50,000 items that they sold and I was creating and then crunching a database,” he explained.
Loblaw’s said in December that Buttigieg played no role in the price-fixing operation.
[Read more: Buttigieg campaign workers get new union contract]
Though he may not be as emotive as some of his Democratic rivals, @PeteButtigieg shows the editorial board a flash of the passion that he says propels his campaign. See more this Sunday on a special 2020 endorsement episode of @TheWeekly. Full transcript: https://t.co/ooUhuoRBV9 pic.twitter.com/6qXKtgA0WF
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) January 16, 2020
Buttigieg’s use of a curse word was a departure from his normally well-mannered and calm exterior demeanor. When pressed on whether he really embodies anger that many young people feel about the state of the country, he pushed back.
“While I may not be as emotive sometimes about my sense of anger or frustration or injustice,” he said, “I would not be doing any of this if I were not propelled by a level of passion.”
Buttigieg also distanced himself from that his McKinsey work for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan in 2007. Years after Buttigieg’s work, the company increased rates and, in 2009, laid off 1,000 employees.
“I had nothing to do with premiums, prices, fees or anything like that,” Buttigieg said. “Mostly what my team was looking at was overhead. There’s no way to know the relationship between analysis I did in 2007 and decisions they made in 2009, but certainly our focus was making sure that cost was under control there.”
Buttigieg scrutinized the company’s choices of clients since he left.
“There seems to be a problem there with assessing what they want to be associated with,” he said, mentioning McKinsey’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement that recommended cutting spending on food and medical care for detained migrants, and with Saudia Arabia, during which the company analyzed public opinion on the regime’s policies.
