Goldman Sachs limits intern hours, urging them to 'be interesting'

Goldman Sachs and other employers are trying to make life easier for young employees by curbing excessive hours worked. 

|
Mark Lennihan/AP
Outside Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York City.

Goldman Sachs is putting a limit on the time interns can spend in the office, saying that they can't work between the hours of midnight and 7 a.m. 

Goldman is one of several Wall Street banks that have been trying to improve working conditions for junior staff by attempting to cut down on hours worked by interns and young employees in entry-level jobs. Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase have all announced new scheduling policies in the past two years encouraging young employees, many of whom work seven days a week, to take at least a few days a month off. 

“We want them to be challenged, but also to operate at a pace where they’re going to stay here and learn important skills that are going to stick,” said David M. Solomon, co-head of the Investment Banking Division at Goldman Sachs, when the bank's schedule change was announced in 2013. “This is a marathon, not a sprint."

The new policies come after the death of Bank of America Merrill Lynch intern Moritz Erhardt in 2013, which may have been partially caused by fatigue from working excessive hours. Following Erhardt's death, his development officer at the bank, Juergen Schroeder, told NBC News there is often a competitive pride among interns to see who can work the longest hours, although the long hours are not required.

"The way the bank assesses candidates is not by hours but by the qualities and skills they bring to the bank," Schroeder said. 

The prototypical Wall Street intern is either a college junior working as an analyst or a business school student serving as an associate, according to Reuters. Goldman currently employs over 2,900 summer interns. 

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein told the firm’s interns in a fireside chat that it is important for them to pursue interests outside of work, rather than completely immersing themselves in finance.  

“You have to be interesting, you have to have interests away from the narrow thing of what you do,” Blankfein said. “You have to be somebody who somebody else wants to talk to.”

The treatment of interns has been a source of controversy in recent years, as several lawsuits have been filed by interns claiming their employers took advantage of them. In 2013, a federal judge ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures broke federal labor law and New York state minimum wage laws when it employed two production interns, Eric Glatt and Alexander Footman, on the film "Black Swan" without paying them. Later that year, two former interns for W Magazine and The New Yorker sued Condé Nast, claiming they were paid less than minimum wage for doing work the magazines would have had to pay someone else a full salary to do. 

Sonia Marciano, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, says the changes made by Goldman and similar companies have already had an effect on the way her students think about their future jobs. 

“My students, men and women, talk much more openly about an expectation of work-life balance," Marciano told The New York Times. “It’s a shift that seems pretty real and substantial.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Goldman Sachs limits intern hours, urging them to 'be interesting'
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2015/0618/Goldman-Sachs-limits-intern-hours-urging-them-to-be-interesting
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe