BANKERS’ HOLIDAY Sachs boss: Maybe you get Saturday off
Goldman Sachs boss David Solomon has heard the complaints from junior bankers about their 100-hour workweeks — and he promises he’ll try to give them Saturdays off.
In a voice memo late Sunday, the hard-charging chief executive told employees he will “strengthen enforcement” of the Wall Street giant’s “Saturday rule” — which means that employees cannot work from 9 p.m. Friday to 9 a.m. Sunday except in certain circumstances — in a bid to make sure they have at least one day off each week.
“In this case, it’s great that this group of analysts went to their management,” Solomon said, referring to a leaked PowerPoint presentation about Goldman’s grueling work conditions which was put together by first-year bankers and which spilled onto social media last week.
The elaborate slideshow, which was shared with managers, includes testimonials of working 20-hour shifts that one worker called “inhuman.” Another said stress, sleep deprivation and the treatment from Goldman’s senior bankers was “arguably worse” than his childhood in foster care.
“We want a workplace where people can share concerns freely,” Solomon said in the late Sunday voice memo, according to a transcript obtained by The Post. “We want to encourage all of you to take the opportunity to speak with your management.”
Solomon — who meanwhile last week got slammed by a report that he has lately been spending long weekends in the Bahamas with the help of the bank’s private jet — also said Goldman will hire more junior bankers, which it promised to do in January, and that it will reassign some workers from less busy divisions to alleviate the workload at busier units. The bank is also turning down some business and working to automate certain jobs, he said.
Goldman Sachs confirmed the memo but declined to comment further.
Solomon’s comments come days after the now-infamous PowerPoint slideshow went viral, with some critics saying it exposed Wall Street’s heartless culture and others calling the first-year analysts a bunch of privileged whiners.
“What is not ok to me is 110-120 hours over the course of a week! The math is simple, that leaves 4 hours for eating, sleeping, showering bathroom and general transition time. This is beyond the level of ‘hard-working,’ it is inhuman/ abuse,” one analyst griped.
“My body physically hurts all the time and mentally I’m in a really dark place,” another kvetched.
The report included bar charts showing the analysts’ deterioration from job stress. Before they arrived at Goldman, the analysts rated their mental and physical health on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the healthiest, at 8.8 and 9, respectively. Since then, those numbers have plunged to 2.8 and 2.3, respectively, according to the bar charts.
Half of the group that participated in the report said they were likely to quit by summer unless conditions improved.
“The good news is, volumes are up,” Solomon said. “In the months ahead, there are times when we’re going to feel more stretched than others, but just remember: If we all go an extra mile for our client, even when we feel that we’re reaching our limit, it can really make a difference in our performance.”