Their environment does not suffer from any side step. Before agreeing to reveal the backstage to us, the young financial guns we approached all asked that their identities be killed. “To say publicly that our company does not respect the 35 hours, it can go very badly in our directions”, underlines one of them, a 27-year-old banker in Paris, who is more used to a weekly rhythm equivalent to three times this legal quota. However, he does not complain about it. Like most of his young acolytes working in a bank or in a business law firm, he is quite ready to ” Play the game “ of these sectors where long working hours and high pressure remain the norm. Even if it means abandoning his private life and seeing his physical and mental state suffer.
Why consent to this hellish pace? “The situation of these young people is all the more surprising in that they have plenty of time to pursue activities that do not compromise their health, since their diplomas would allow them to change professions without threatening their social position”is surprised François Schoenberger, doctoral student in sociology at the EHESS and the University of Lausanne, who studies Ihe springs of commitment to the profession of investment banker.
While the discourse of a generation wishing for more balance has emerged in recent years, these young people from prestigious training remain, themselves, still committed to the culture of overwork – or “overwork”according to the slang that is beginning to cross the Atlantic – in which they see an investment for the future.
“You learn on steroids, it’s exhilarating. A 27-year-old business lawyer
Quentin (the first names of the witnesses have been changed), 27, says that he ” used to “ to sleep little. A lawyer in a large Parisian business firm, he works six days a week and regularly finishes after midnight. “The excitement created by the files makes it possible to hold on despite the lack of sleepassures this graduate of the Sciences Po Paris law school. And then we have such an intense rhythm that we are not likely to fall asleep during the day. » For him, accepting such time amplitudes goes without saying: “To get the best training in the profession, you have to be on the right files and with the right lawyers. Few firms combine the two, so they are very demanding. You learn on steroids, it’s exhilarating. »
Moreover, this work intensity constitutes in itself a “attractive element” for those who project themselves into these careers, remarks François Schoenberger. “There is a real emulation, adrenaline: you are like in the trenches with your friends”explains Naël, out of the ESCP, who spent several years in a “shop” of mergers and acquisitions at a weekly rate of more than 100 hours of work. “They say they have ‘got caught up in the game’: breaking records, being in competition, handling abstractions under time constraints, ‘like in prep’notes the sociologist of work Marie-Anne Dujarier. It is this game that creates so much zeal in these young people, who often arrive without a prior vocation. »
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