Goldman Sachs Cuts Intern Working Hours: Wants Them To Sleep And Be Interesting

Wall Street Investment banking firm, Goldman Sachs has taken a pioneering step by advising interns to head home by midnight and have proper sleep. Investment banks are known for their long work hours where deal negotiations and preparation for client meetings stretch the work into late night and many of the staff are all-nighters.

Under the new guidelines, interns have to stay away from the office between midnight and 7 a.m. during weekdays. According to a Goldman spokesperson, the firm had been making efforts to improve the work experience for junior bankers, by offering pay hikes, mentoring programs and hiring more interns to reduce the workload. The embargo on late night work is the latest. Goldman welcomed 2,900 summer interns in June at its various divisions.

Death Of Intern

However, the sudden concern on longer hours seems to have stemmed from the tragic end of a 21-year old intern, who was working with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. He is said to have pulled all-nighters to impress his bosses. The Intern, Moritz Erhardt was found dead in the shower of his London flat after having worked 72 hours non-stop. The inquest said he died of an epileptic seizure, possibly triggered by extensive working hours.

Shortly after Erhardt’s death, Goldman Sach’s chief executive Lloyd Blankfein advised the company's interns that they need not give up their lives for the firm. “You have to be interesting; you have to have interests away from the narrow thing of what you do. You have to be somebody who somebody else wants to talk to,” he said.

Lucrative Career

Goldman’s spokesman Michael DuValley told CBS News that the new policy that began in June will improve "the overall work experience" of the Goldman Sachs interns. It is a known fact that the hard-earned internships, known as analysts and associates are a stepping stone to high-paying jobs in Wall Street. Driven by the lure of lucrative career prospects, many interns follow their seniors' work habits and get into strenuously long hours of work at a stretch. In February 2015, a 22-year-old Goldman Sachs analyst, who complained to his family of not having slept for days due to workload, was found dead in a San Francisco parking lot.

The trend of fatality concurs with the data from the National Occupational Mortality Surveillance that said finance workers remain in high stress and 1.5 times more prone to suicide, compared to workers from other professions.

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