The death of Mortiz Erhardt is a tragedy. The 21-year-old German student, who had been hired as a summer intern by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, was found dead at his East London home earlier this month. Some reports suggest he had pulled three “all nighters” in a row. No inquest has been held as yet, and no autopsy results released, so there is no way to know whether Erhardt had some underlying condition that might have been partly responsible for his death. But already the question is being posed across Wall Street: Does this heartbreaking loss for Erhardt’s family and friends say anything about the financial world in which the young man had hoped to build a career?
Bank of America Merrill Lynch said Friday that it has set up a special committee to investigate the case and the working conditions of interns and other employees. “Our immediate priority is to do everything we can to continue to support the Erhardt family, our interns and impacted employees at this extremely difficult time,” the statement said, in part. “We have also convened a formal senior working group to consider the facts as they become known, to review all aspects of this tragedy, to listen to employees at all levels and to help us learn from them.”
As with most dramatic events, this case is more complex than some melodramatic newspaper headlines would suggest. The very idea that any 21-year-old was so vital a part of Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s operations that he couldn’t be spared from his office to grab even five or six hours of sleep for three nights running is clearly absurd. But it isn’t our perception that matters. Like the law and medicine, Wall Street has long had an extreme work culture, one characterized by young employees working ridiculously long hours without a break in order to demonstrate their valor and value.
In medicine, the obvious dangers associated with sleep deprived care providers have led to changes. A decade ago, the authorities responsible for overseeing the accreditation of new physicians banned first-year residents from working more than 30 hours running; in 2011, that was cut further, to 16 hours. In the law and on Wall Street, clients’ lives aren’t at stake if exhausted interns or junior employees trying to prove themselves work 80 or 100 hours a week – or even more – and make mistakes. Moreover, tragedies like Erhardt’s death are rare.
That’s why the SEC and other regulators, in their attempts to police financial markets, don’t try to regulate how many hours a Wall Street intern can work. In the United States, at least, much of the attention has been focused on making sure interns are fairly compensated and that the interns derive real benefits from their roles, rather than on monitoring the number of hours worked.
Many of us who work in white-collar professions might find the idea of a 40-hour workweek or (or, more specifically, 37.5 hours a week of work) a little laughable. We work until the job is done – and becoming efficient is part of what is seen as being good at one’s job. Someone who literally worked from 9 to 5 (or 10 to 6) in most professions might be seen as less than committed. As a journalist, what if a complex story breaks when your 8-hour day is up? Are you really going to let someone else write it? Not likely. (And let’s not even raise the question of what’s involved in being a war correspondent….)
If there’s a product tampering scare and the CEO calls up the marketing department to develop a strategic response, which members of that group are going to say they can only stick around another hour before their workday is up, or suggest that if they work until midnight today, then they’ll be entitled to a day off next week? What if, during the financial crisis of 2008, the CEO of one of the investment banks had said he needed a full eight hours’ sleep to be able to think clearly? Would events have stood still to enable him to get his rest? And, the thinking goes, this is something that an employee needs to learn as early as possible.
With respect to interns, the logic tends to be that if they can’t demonstrate their commitment when they are trying to earn a place for themselves within an organization, how will they acquire that kind of work ethic down the road? Moreover, part of this work ethic is self-imposed. At some companies and in some professions, interns and young employees believe that working on a near-constant basis leads to an increased chance of promotion.
RELATED: HARRY REID’S UNPAID INTERN TURNS TO CROWDFUNDING
They aren’t wrong. At any firm, the keener you show yourself to be, the more likely you are to be viewed favorably by your seniors, in whose hands your future job prospects, raises and bonus payments lie. Are you the kind of co-worker that everyone can trust to put a big merger proposal together overnight on behalf of the client? Or are you the guy who says, once or twice a month, he has to have to leave early to get to his kid’s basketball game or walk his dog? Any intern who is determined to land a job is going to emulate the kind of behavior demonstrated by a firm’s top performers, regardless of what the rules may be.
In many professions, it’s hard to tell when an individual is actually doing a bad job because he’s too tired to think clearly or deploy good judgment. Even in medicine, where authorities police the 16-hour rule and where poor medical outcomes can provide a very clear hint that something went wrong, this remains a problem. In the most recent issue of The New Yorker magazine, Lisa Rosenbaum suggests that the new limitations haven’t improved patient health. “The daily ritual (of the morning rounds by doctors and interns) has morphed into a race against the clock,” she writes. “Instead of … asking who the sickest patient is, we now ask which resident needs to leave.”
Even if Erhardt’s death leads to new rules or policies on Wall Street, that isn’t going to change the culture, especially since – in contrast to medicine – it’s hard to directly link poor outcomes in finance to overwork. (Can we blame the financial crisis of 2008 on carelessness due to exhaustion?) Top bankers would have to reshape their own behavior and begin rewarding a different approach to work – and risk losing clients, dealflow and profits to rivals that didn’t follow suit. The odds that that will happen? I’d rate them at precisely zero.
Don’t misunderstand. I suspect that everyone at Bank of America Merrill Lynch is genuinely horrified by Erhardt’s death, and anxious to prevent it from happening again. But they’ll also be extremely relieved if the autopsy results show that there was some underlying cause – perhaps epilepsy, or undiagnosed heart problems – that they can draw comfort from as they continue to turn a blind eye to a culture that requires all of its employees, from the youngest to the eldest, to show just how tough they are.
