Bank of America keeps pushing its workers past their physical limits

Banking is widely known to be a work-hard, play-hard industry, but there’s a point at which it gets legitimately inhumane. 

A Bank of America employee died in May after working 100-hour weeks for a month straight while toiling away on a $2 billion acquisition. That prompted this stunning Wall Street Journal deep dive into the bank’s work culture, citing interviews with more than three dozen people familiar with work conditions at BofA. 

It gives vivid detail on how the bank drives its employees past the breaking point. A few pieces of the insanity, with our bolds and slight edits for emphasis and clarity: 

Senior bankers kept her and her teammates at their desks until 5 a.m. and instructed them to lie about their hours. Once, she said, she worked until 4 a.m. in the office and was on her way home in a taxi, only for her boss to request more changes for a proposal to a client and to leave a printed copy for senior staff to review later that morning. She asked the cabdriver to turn around. 

Another New York banker, currently a vice president, checked into a hospital this year after he felt rundown and sick from working around the clock—yet he chose to continue fulfilling tasks and took client calls from his hospital bed. 

One current associate said the bank’s human-resources department intervened after he worked over 100 hours a week for a month. When his bosses were forced to give him a day off, he planned a long bike ride to clear his mind. He had just started biking when his manager called and said he needed him to work several hours that day without logging the hours.

She worked overnight Wednesday and Thursday to meet the deadline. The boss responded by requesting more changes by the following morning. The associate, who still works at the bank, said she got a reprieve when another senior employee overheard her crying in the bathroom and confronted her boss, saying she had been pushed too far. 

The Journal’s report said one big problem is that senior bankers see the early years of banking as a rite of passage, which prompts some of them to ignore the bank’s rules designed to protect younger workers. Ah yes, that old chestnut: “I once suffered, so you must suffer, too.”

BofA changed its own rules a decade ago following the death of an intern in its London office after he worked several all-nighters in a row. The new rules mandated at least one weekend day off and flagged any worker going over an 80-hour week. 

A BofA spokeswoman told the Journal that “our practices are clear and we expect all employees including managers to follow them. When we’ve learned of violations, disciplinary actions have been taken.”

She also said investment-banking jobs at BofA were “sought after” and “challenging” and that the bank had gotten roughly half a million applications for entry-level positions over the past four years. For perspective, Bank of America employed 213,000 workers in total at the end of 2023, down slightly from 2022, according to its latest annual report.

Know what would probably work out better for everybody? If BofA hired more of those applicants instead of working its existing staffers past 4 a.m.