SIGNING INTO CORPORATE SLAVERY

In the aftermath of a Merrill Lynch intern's sudden demise at work after several days and nights of non-stop work, another intern shares her experience when also slaving away at that company.  Polly Courtney offers an insider's perspective. 

 

My So-Called Life as an Intern at Merrill Lynch. 

 

Excerpts:

 

On Monday night, Moritz Erhardt, 21, was found dead in his east London flat. He was a week away from finishing a summer internship at the London office of Merrill Lynch. The exact cause of his death is not known, but it is claimed that Mr Moritz had worked three “all-nighters” in a row before his death and was determined to earn himself a full-time role at the bank.

 

I too interned in the London offices of Merrill Lynch before accepting a job on the graduate scheme.We bought into the idea that fulfilment would come from “succeeding” in this crazy game. For seven weeks, our world shrank to one square mile and during that time, nothing else mattered. We forgot about family, friends, pets, birthdays.  We could tell you the value of the FTSE but we couldn’t say how our grandmothers were doing.

 

Hundred-hour weeks were standard. Many of my peers treated Saturdays as a working day and then tried to take half of Sunday off to recover. Some didn’t even bother to go home when they worked through the night; they just showered in the in-house gym, bought a toothbrush from the in-house shop, grabbed an espresso from the in-house Starbucks, and they were good to go for another day.

 

Of course, we knew this wasn’t productive in the long term. But the adrenaline (combined with caffeine and taurine – or cocaine, in the cases of many full-time bankers) would see us through.

 

One night, my flatmates and I were woken by the doorbell at 2am. It was a company car, waiting to take me back into the office to “check some figures”.There was a culture of vindictiveness that trickled down the hierarchy. VPs would dump work on associates, who would dump it on analysts, who, at the end of the working day, would dump it on the intern with a deadline of 9 o’clock the following morning, even if it was needed for an afternoon meeting. And often, the afternoon meeting would be cancelled and nobody would think to tell the intern.

 

We weren’t forced to do anything. We worked through the night because we chose to. We were keen, naïve undergraduates, desperate to make our mark on the world.Of course I wanted to live this life. I wanted to be a banker. I wanted the chance to go all the way to the top.I hope this terrible tragedy serves as a wakeup call – not just to employers and policy-makers in the investment banking community, but also to employees. The money is just an anaesthetic; it might work for a seven-week internship or perhaps even longer, but it wears off in the end.

 

Polly Courtney is the author of ‘Golden Handcuffs – the Lowly Life of a High Flyer’, a semi-autobiographical novel based on her life as a junior investment banker.

Read more - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/my-socalled-life-asan-internat-merrill-lynch-8782735.html

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