JPMorgan, Bank of America to curb long hours for workers after fury over death of Leo Lukenas who logged 100 hours per week
Two of Wall Street’s largest banks are reportedly planning to clamp down on the number of hours that junior bankers work per week in the wake of outrage over the tragic death of a 35-year-old Bank of America associate who logged 100-hour work weeks.
Bank of America — which came under scrutiny after staffer and former Green Beret Leo Lukenas III suffered a fatal a heart attack in May — is putting in place a new timekeeping tool that requires junior bankers to specify how their time is spent, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
JPMorgan will cap junior bankers’ work hours at 80 per week — the first limits enacted by the nation’s largest lender — with exceptions to be made in certain cases such as a live deal, according to The Journal.
The moves come after The Journal published a wide-ranging exposé detailing how Bank of America managers told direct reports to lie about their extensive hours even when they exceeded an 80-hour limit put in place more than a decade ago following the death of an overworked intern.
Bank of America’s new time-keeping tool, which the bank said was being developed before Lukenas’ death on May 2, is scheduled to go live next week, The Journal reported.
The software will require junior investment bankers in the US to log hours daily rather than weekly.
The junior bankers will also be required to specify which deals they are working on and when they are working on them, as well as the names of the managers that are overseeing their assignments, The Journal reported.
Junior bankers will be able to grade on a scale of 1 to 4 how much capacity they have for more work, according to the newspaper.
The Post reached out to Bank of America for comment.
JPMorgan’s junior bankers have self-reported their hours through time sheets for years and are guaranteed a weekend off every three months. They also can’t be called into work from 6 p.m. Friday to noon Saturday.
Senior bankers have been communicating the new guidelines to staffers in recent weeks, according to The Journal. The new weekly cap is the same as the New York State limit for hours of medical residents.
JPMorgan declined to comment when reached by The Post.
In May, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that the nation’s largest lender was asking “what can we learn” from Lukenas’ death.
The married father of two young kids died from what medical examiners determined was acute coronary artery thrombus — days after working on a team that completed a $2 billion merger.
Just before his death, Lukenas was looking for a new job due to the grind from logging at least 16 hours each day, as The Post previously reported.
While there is no direct evidence to suggest his work had anything to do with his death, numerous studies have linked acute stress to thrombosis.
“We are very saddened by the loss of our teammate. We continue to focus on doing whatever we can to support the family and our team especially those who worked closely with him,” the BoA spokesperson told The Post at the time.
The bank enacted an 80-hour cap in 2013 after the death of Moritz Erhardt, a 21-year-old intern at its London office. He died after working until 6 a.m. three nights in a row.
The Journal’s investigation, however, found that junior staffers routinely violated the cap limits and were told to lie to supervisors about excessive workloads.
Several staffers griped to the Journal about grueling work schedules that resulted in health maladies and hospitalizations for a range of stress-related conditions.
A Bank of America spokesperson 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.”
Two weeks after Lukenas’ death, another Bank of America trader in London, 25-year-old Adnan Deumic, suddenly died after collapsing at a charity soccer game two weeks later.
The cause of death was believed to be cardiac arrest.
