Goldman Sachs Restricts Intern Work Hours To Only 17 Hours A Day After Bank Of America Intern Death

SteveHolt10 years ago

New York investment firm Goldman Sachs is cutting back on intern hours following the 2013 death of a Bank of America intern from seizures induced by too many all-nighters in the office.

The firm is telling its interns not to work more than 17 hours a day. In at 7 a.m. and home at midnight. These generous hours are now in effect for all 2015 summer interns so that none of them will die from exhaustion.

From The Guardian:

The new rules, introduced for this summer’s crop of investment banking interns, have been introduced “to improve the overall work experience of our interns”, a Goldman Sachs spokesman said. All of its summer interns across the world were informed of the new working hours rule on their first day in the office earlier this month.

Wall Street’s shift to caring capitalism comes in the wake of the death of a 21-year-old Bank of America Merrill Lynch intern who had regularly pulled all-nighters in a desperate bid to impress his bosses.

Moritz Erhardt was found dead in the shower at his London accommodation after working 72 hours straight. An inquest found he died of an epileptic seizure that could have been a triggered by his long working hours.

Shortly after Erhardt’s death, Goldman Sach’s chief executive Lloyd Blankfein told his interns that they shouldn’t give over their whole lives to the firm. “You have to be interesting, you have to have interests away from the narrow thing of what you do,” he said. “You have to be somebody who somebody else wants to talk to.”

Dying to impress the bosses? If that doesn’t get their attention, I’m not sure anything will.

We know the life of an investment banker isn’t always easy, but if 17 hours is a laid back day at work, you must be doing some serious amounts of cocaine in your minimal down time.

Am I bitter because I didn’t get a high-paying IB internship with a top firm last summer? No — well, yes. Sure, the payoff of being an investment banker comes five years down the road when you are swimming in cash, but there is more to life than being 23 and overwhelmed by work stress. Actually, swimming in cash sounds pretty nice. To each his own, I suppose.

Rule of thumb: If an internship program has been known to kill interns from time to time, take at least a day to decide before sacrificing the rest of your life to it..

[via The Guardian]

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