The 17 hour workday
by digby
Go home before midnight, and don’t come back before 7am. Goldman Sachs – one of Wall Street’s toughest firms – has told interns they have got to work hard, but not too hard.
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.
They should just give over 17 hours day to it. Hell, they can sleep when they’re dead. Which may be sooner than they think!
These young people choose to do this stupid thing for the reward of big money at the end of the rainbow. And, in fairness, they do have lots of money waiting for them at the end of that rainbow. This is supposed to separate the slackers from those who are willing to do anything to get their hands on it. But that ethos naturally dehumanizes anyone, even rich people. If you’re the type of person who is willing to submit yourself to this sort of hazing or bootcamp in order to become part of that elite club you may already be half the way there.
Lloyd Blankfein said, “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,” but he didn’t offer any reason why that would be so. Sure, if you want to have an interesting life full of love and adventure and intellectual enrichment then that would be true. But if you’re just chasing as much money as you can get your hands on it’s hard to see why being somebody someone else wants to talk to is particularly valuable unless he’s saying you need it for sales purposes. Which is, of course, the only reason any good capitalist would ever think anything like that would be necessary.
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