A junior banker left RBC in an ambulance. Was another junior to blame?
When junior bankers suffer health emergencies, it's become standard practice to seek out managing directors (MDs) to blame. It happened when Leo Lukenas died while working for Bank of America. It happened again when Carter McIntosh died at Jefferies.
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No one has died at RBC Capital Markets in New York City, but there are repeated claims that one particular team there has been overworked, not by the managing director, but by a junior banker and senior analyst.
The claims came after a junior analyst on RBC's New York industrials team was taken to hospital in an ambulance in late April. Initially discussed on forum website Wall Street Oasis, the incident has not been reported elsewhere.
RBC declined multiple opportunities to comment on the allegations. Speaking off the record, another junior on the team says the analyst who left in an ambulance was a first year who had been working "insane hours." - "That day, I think they hadn't slept and had been working something like 40 hours straight. They looked out of it, and then they collapsed in the evening before dinner," says the other team member. "Someone called an ambulance and they were away for 2.5 weeks; now they're back again."
Like juniors at Deutsche Bank, juniors at RBC say there's no real system for monitoring working hours in place at the bank. In theory, juniors have Saturdays off. In reality, this can be overruled.
At Deutsche Bank, though, insiders say junior bankers are being overworked by ambitious new managing directors eager to prove themselves in a challenging market. At RBC, insiders say it's a senior analyst on the team who's the issue.
"We worked with him while we were interns," says the junior banker. "He would punt his work off onto us and go home without really explaining what he wanted us to do, and setting unrealistic deadlines, even though clients hadn't requested them. He'd then take credit for our work."
Now that the junior banker is more senior, and is up for promotion, the situation is allegedly the same if not worse. RBC's HR team is thought to be investigating after a meeting held by Joshua Rosenbaum, RBC's global head of industrials, shortly after the analyst left in an ambulance in April.
Industrials banking teams can be particularly harsh places to work. Baird's Industrials team was accused of being a particular sweatshop by the Wall Street Journal in April.
"We all knew that banking would be an intense job and that we had long hours coming," says the junior. But seeing this happen to a colleague first hand was terrible, and none of us want it to happen again."
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