Should bankers be punished for their private lives?

9 June 2008

2 minute read

Should bankers be punished for their private lives?

RBS banker Alexandre Graham, who organised last weekend's anti-drinking ban protest on the Tube, has left the firm, after fearing for his job once the story broke. But should banks really get involved in employees' private lives?

Around 10,000 people descended on the Tube on 1 June to protest against no longer being able to booze on the underground. The Standard reported with glee that the mastermind was, shock-horror, an investment banker working for RBS.

Graham has since escaped the media glare by leaving RBS and fleeing to the jungles of South America. It's not clear whether he was pushed or left of his own accord.

However, RBS was said to be "deeply embarrassed" by the event, and Graham was afraid he might be sacked after the revelations.

Let's put it in perspective. It's not as though he was a criminal mastermind or a social revolutionary, he just set up an event on Facebook, which got out of control.

And would it have caused such a media circus if it were organised by a plumber from Basingstoke? Probably not.

Positioned somewhere towards the upper echelons of society, bankers, the world assumes, should behave with a sense of decorum.

Is this a fair assumption? Should bankers be able to cut loose at the weekends, organise parties and protests just like everyone else? Or do their individual actions reflect on the organisation they work for?

Your thoughts please....

AUTHOReFinancialCareers UK

Insider Comment

la
lawyertype
19 June 2008
Poundhopper....!
How deleriously, sweetly apt that in the current economic climate mainly caused by greedy banking types that you should think the law is pompous and high minded!!.....?
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Pe
Peter
16 June 2008
You finance guys know the best places to go for 'overtime', as you tell your wives! Anyone can go and drink. But the real fun is to had horizontally...
I'm totally jealous.
No moralising from me.
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Jo
John
16 June 2008
As long as it's kept private! I've met so many guys in finance, especially in Thailand, Singapore and Tokyo who are seriously, repeat, seriously, misbehaving! Enough to make a tabloid editor blush!!! But they present themselves for work as the fine professionals they are.
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Le
Leap-frog
14 June 2008
Interesting comments, Pondhopper. I do not actually disagree, yet I question whether yours is the best platform to take the high grounds from. After all, the US is the place where it took months to impeach a president who blatantly lied under oath, and which re-elected the one that got them at war under false pretences. Your politicians get caught out in scandals on a regular basis, yet only leave their seat when fired. Few resign. If Wall Street and Capitol Hill are allowed different standards of behaviour, surely you can allow for the fact that, sometimes, it may not be a bad thing to reconsider whether those standards still have meaning.
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Po
Pondhopper
13 June 2008
I always marvel at what the comments on eFC-UK reveal about English character. In this case, what's interesting isn't that just about everyone thinks he should be fired - in America too his firing would be a fait accompli that no one would complain about. But there would be no moralizing about it: on Wall Street it's simply assumed that any banker or support staffer whose name gets in any newspaper for any reason that wasn't pre-approved by their management, will be summarily fired (and deserves to be). It's interesting, and a little funny, to see that's not enough for the English - you've got to throw in all this pompously high-minded public-order/public-nuisance business to justify his firing. (And here I thought Calvinism was more an American than a British thing.) About 10 years ago some people in my office became obsessed with an online "purity test." Questions like, would you sleep with someone you disliked intensely, just to spite them? Also several questions about personal drinking habits. Totally pedestrian stuff. Well, for some reason I never understood, the British people who worked there were utterly and perversely fascinated by this test. Go figure.
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