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The South African job market is saturated with posts for interns (you’ll work for free, but gain that magical ‘experience’), or jobs with entry-level pay grades that require years of experience and long working hours.

To crack a spot at Goldman Sachs, a US investment bank and financial services company headquartered in New York, is no mean feat, but getting a foot in the door is just the start of the battle.

According to a group of 13 first-year analysts working at the company, it’s actually a pretty crummy gig.

CNN reports:

…analysts say they are working more than 95 hours a week on average, sleeping just five hours a night and enduring workplace abuse. The majority of them say their mental health has deteriorated significantly since they started working at the investment bank.

“There was a point where I was not eating, showering or doing anything else other than working from morning until after midnight,” one analyst says in the report.

That’s about as far from living the holiday as one can get. Sies. A 95-hour workweek is around 13,5 hours of work, seven days a week.

You can see the full survey results here, but consider this:

According to a report last year, first-year investment bank analysts at Goldman Sachs can expect a base salary that starts from around $90 000.

Factor in the cost of living in New York, and that number looks less impressive.

The analysts knew that once they entered the cutthroat world of Wall Street banking, long hours and hard work would be par for the course, but they’re now calling for measures to be put in place that would cap a week’s work at 80 hours:

“This is beyond the level of ‘hard-working,'” one said. “This is inhumane.”

“My body physically hurts all the time and mentally I’m in a really dark place,” one analyst wrote in the survey.

“I didn’t come into this job expecting 9am-5pm’s,” one analyst wrote, “but I also didn’t expect consistent 9am-5am’s either.”

In response to the report circulating publicly, after it was first presented to Goldman Sachs management last month, CEO David Solomon stated that it was something leadership took very seriously.

To reduce the workload, Solomon said the company will strengthen enforcement of its “Saturday rule” and speed up the hiring of junior bankers.

Again, from CNN:

One of the analysts’ pleas to management — in addition to capping workweeks at 80 hours — was to better enforce the “Saturday rule,” which stipulates that junior staff should not be expected in the office between 9 pm Friday and 9 am Sunday. They said junior staff are often asked to do “quick” work on Saturdays “and it is incredibly hard to push back.”

“We’re strengthening enforcement of the Saturday rule,” Solomon said, adding that the bank would hire more junior staff across its investment banking division…

“Clients are active, and volumes in a lot of our businesses are at historic highs,” he said. “Of course, the combination of the pandemic and all this activity put stress and strain on everyone at Goldman Sachs.”

This is far from the first time the workloads of these companies has been put under the spotlight.

In 2013, Moritz Erhardt, a 21-year-old Bank of America Merrill Lynch intern, was found dead in a shower at his London flat after working for 72 hours straight, and suffering an epileptic seizure.

In 2015, 22-year-old Goldman Sachs analyst Sarvshreshth Gupta committed suicide after complaining of working more than 100 hours a week.

Save the ‘in my day’ stuff, too – just because you were worked to the bone doesn’t mean that’s how it should be.

[sources:cnn&cnn]