Two Wall Street banks are cracking down on young bankers’ working hours, as the industry continues to grapple with a long-standing culture of overwork.
On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that JPMorgan Chase plans to limit bankers’ hours and that Bank of America is using a new tool to track their time on the job.
JPMorgan will cap working time at 80 hours a week. This is the first time the bank has taken such a measure. It carves out one big exception: live deals, typically the most taxing part of the job, when bankers need to be on call for high-stakes work around the clock.
BofA, which already flagged work above that 80-hour weekly threshold to human resources, is implementing a system that requires junior bankers to share more details about how their time is spent and to which senior bankers they report. They will also be asked to note how much capacity they have for more work.
Peers Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have no such working hour caps, the Journal reported.
The crackdown follows the death of a 35-year-old Bank of America banker, whose death in May renewed concerns about Wall Street’s grueling working conditions. While the coroner’s report did not establish a connection between his death and work, the death prompted a raft of questions across the industry about working conditions, particularly among the company’s junior ranks, Business Insider previously reported.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in May that executives talked about what they learned from the banker’s death.
The new rules come after the Journal’s August investigation into BofA. The story detailed how junior bankers are routinely instructed to lie about their working hours so that they don’t exceed the bank’s policies. The bank asked employees to report any such instances to HR following the story.
However, current and former employees told BI in May that the call from HR feels “surface level” and is a way for the bank to “cover” itself in the event of backlash. Known as the “banker’s diary,” the tool is also used to pile on more work if there appear to be openings in an employee’s schedule.
JPMorgan and Bank of America did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.
