Overworked Wall Street employees experience seizures, are hospitalized, and have died
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Wall Street has always been a very demanding place to work and with recent work-related deaths, it seems that Wall Street must find a way to provide work-life balance to its employees.
Highlights
Catholic Online (https://www.catholic.org)
10/5/2015 (8 years ago)
Published in Business & Economics
Keywords: Wall Street, bankers, suicide
NEW YORK CITY, NY (Catholic Online) - Thomas Hughes was a 29-year-old investment banker who was so intent to stand out among his peers that he worked through holidays, weekends and sometimes over 24 hours.
Hughes worked at Moelis & Company, a Wall Street advisory firm.
A senior Wall Street executive said, "When somebody commits suicide, it's not because they were working too hard." The executive denied the suicide incidents of young professionals were higher in Wall Street than in any other industry.
One month before Thomas Hughes's suicide, Sarvshreshth Gupta, a 22-year-old banking analyst at Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, committed suicide after a stressful day at work. During the same time, another bank analyst from Sachs was hospitalized after experiencing a seizure following a 72-hour work binge. Two years before these incidents, Moritz Erhardt, a 21-year-old banking analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, died after having a seizure in the shower in preparation to return to the office after having worked 72 hours straight without sleep.
Wall Street has been finding ways to provide work-life balance for bank employees but refuses to hire more people. Despite Wall Street's vigorous work requirements, it still attracts overly ambitious men and women who are willing to do whatever it takes to meet their bosses' expectations -even if that means doing consecutive all-nighters or working during the holidays and over weekends.
Kevin Roose, the author of Young Money, wrote, "They are doing it to themselves willingly because the competition is so fierce and anything they can do to stand out they are going to do ... You can't really stand out because most of what you're doing does not require original thinking. So the only way you can distinguish yourself is by sheer endurance. Gluttons for punishment are rewarded on Wall Street, especially at the young levels."
Sachs has since introduced a new policy for summer interns in investment banking, which requires them to leave the office before midnight and not to pull all-nighters. Other firms have varying versions of this rule as well.
Thomas Hughes' father wonders why Wall Street refused to simply hire more people and pay everyone a little less. As a father, he doesn't understand why he had to lose his son because of a job.
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