Interns keep working at BofA after colleague's death Bank of America Merrill Lynch gave interns the option to end placements early after a 21-year-old undergraduate died. But they decided to keep working. The City of London has come under pressure to reform its hardworking culture after the BofA intern's death. But the decision by Moritz Erhardt's peers to stay on highlights the determination of many young people to win a passport into that world. The bank declined to comment on reports that the German student, doing a summer internship at the bank, died because he had an epileptic fit after he worked until 6am three days in a row. BofA said it was not aware of any interns at the US bank's London office taking up an offer to leave before the end of the week, when internships are scheduled to finish. The labour market has become an increasingly hostile place for young people since the financial crisis, adding to their determination to find a foothold in a well-paid career. Youth unemployment is near 20 per cent. And British people in their twenties last had real net incomes as low as today in 1999, a much worse plight than any other age group. "Young people are very desperate," said Katerina Rudiger from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. This kind of economic situation can mean they're open to exploitation, or might go the extra mile, not even because it's being asked of them but because they think that's what they need to do. Some current and former interns said they went into the City with their eyes wide open. "You're not being exploited, you are exploiting yourself," said Jana Bakunina, who left banking in 2009. When I was an analyst, HR would organise work-life balance seminars at 8pm and then we would go back to our desks and work all night. Others said there was pressure to conform. "The industry is so highly competitive that to last, you really try to get into the culture of the firm, to really become part of the team, and to do that you have to be willing to do just about anything," said a law intern, who has been working "all-nighters" in the office and at home. The long hours culture is particularly ingrained in investment banks. One former graduate said some trainees might stay late just to prove that they were hard workers: most of the time they just had too much to do. The work people are doing at two or three in the morning is the same work they're doing at nine or 10 in the morning. She has since wondered why the sector relies so heavily on people working long hours. There's just a belief among the senior bankers that if they're not available to their clients 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, if they won't take a call on Christmas eve, then the client will take their business to someone else. Working conditions vary from place to place and even from manager to manager. One intern at a management consultancy said the company had taken him on several holidays. "It's quite carefully structured to make sure you enjoy yourself and come away with a good impression of the company," he said. It's a two-way process - you're pitching to the company but they're also pitching to you. But a former worker from the same sector remembered endless late nights as senior partners suddenly decided that they wanted a change to a client presentation. "They don't need you to stick around for more than a couple of years, they don't really care - they get what they need out of you and that's fine," he said. Banks monitor the workload of their interns and junior staff in different ways. Some leave it to the discretion of managers. Others have staffers who raise red flags if they detect unusually long working hours. Anastasia Chernetskaya, who worked as an intern at RBS Capital Markets this year, was braced for extremely long hours. "It was a complete surprise for me to find the office pretty much empty by 10pm," she said. I had one all-nighter . . . and when my line manager found out, she had a word with the head of the team and they let me go at 7pm that day. Finance keeps its allure for young When investment banks helped tip the world into recession in 2008, some thought young people would fall out of love with working in high finance, writes Sarah O'Connor. But UK universities say financial services recruitment fairs remain as popular as ever, despite constant cuts to jobs and bonuses in the sector. Goldman Sachs had 17,000 applications this year for its 350 summer internships in investment banking. Why has the financial world lost none of its allure? John Philpott from The Jobs Economist, a consultancy, says the answer is in the bleak economic climate. "Right at the height of the crisis, there was a sense that young people were going to turn away from finance towards more so-called productive activities but as time has worn on, the imperative to get work and make a decent income seems to have overridden any of those concerns for the majority," he said. And, like in other sectors, there's been a great scramble to get any opportunities or internships on offer.