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- Junior bankers at Goldman Sachs work an average of 98 hours per week, according to a new survey.
- That means they are being paid around the same as a Starbucks manager before bonuses.
- In 2021, Goldman's junior bankers protested similarly long work hours, calling it "workplace abuse."
Junior bankers at Goldman Sachs are working an average of 98 hours a week — 18 hours more than their peers, according to a new survey.
This means first-year bankers at the firm are making about $22 an hour, around the same as a manager at Starbucks, according to calculations by Insider's Emmalyse Brownstein. This number does not include bonuses, and assumes junior bankers are taking two weeks of vacation.
While end-of-year bonuses can be a large chunk of Wall Street pay, they are slated to dwindle this year due to a decline in IPOs and M&A. Bonus pools, which hit record levels last year, are on track to be slashed by about 30% at banks like JPMorgan and Citigroup, Bloomberg reported.
A spokesperson from Goldman Sachs told Brownstein that the "data does not match ours" in response to an email sharing the findings of the survey. The spokesperson also declined to share the firm's own findings about how many hours its junior bankers are clocking a week.
At an average of 98 hours a week, Goldman's junior bankers are working 18 hours more than their fellow junior bankers who reported working an average of 80 hours per week, the survey found. Junior bankers at the runner up to Goldman averaged about 86 hours a week.
Over 2,500 first-year investment bankers from around 50 US firms were asked their pay, what they like and don't like about their job, and their perks, in a survey by Odyssey Search Partners. The results from the survey are shared with private equity firms and clients who want to recruit talent from banks.
In 2021, Goldman was thrown into turmoil after an internal survey by first-year analysts at the firm was leaked to the press, showing junior bankers had reached a breaking point.
Junior bankers responded they were working 98 hours a week, only getting 5 hours of sleep, and went to bed around 3 a.m. All of them said work hours negatively affected their relationships, and almost 80% of respondents said they felt like a victim of workplace abuse.
"We recognize that our people are very busy, because business is strong and volumes are at historic levels," a Goldman spokesperson told Insider at the time. "A year into COVID, people are understandably quite stretched, and that's why we are listening to their concerns and taking multiple steps to address them."
According to Brownstein's report, it doesn't seem much has changed in regards to working hours for the first-years at Goldman.
Read more from the survey here.