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A week after a German Bank of America intern was found dead in London after allegedly working for 72 hours straight, the tragedy has prompted scrutiny of what many say is a culture of chronic overwork of young employees in the global finance industry, as well as the increasingly rigorous demands placed on interns in many fields. 聽

London police discovered the body of 21-year-old Moritz Erhardt on Aug. 15 at his East London accommodation, where he reportedly collapsed in the shower after working through three straight nights until 6 a.m.

Although the cause of his death is still unknown, Mr. Erhardt had been nearing the end of a grinding summer internship at BOA鈥檚 Merrill Lynch investment banking unit in downtown London, where fellow interns and industry experts say 15-hour days are the expected dues for earning a full-time job down the line, and all-nighters are not uncommon.

As Kevin Roose, who is working on a book about young Wall Street bankers, explains in New York magazine, that kind of bruising schedule has come to be seen as simply 鈥減art of the basic bargain鈥� of working your way up the financial career ladder.聽

But critics say that interns, who are young, ambitious, and often unfamiliar with their rights and responsibilities as workers, are easy targets for exploitative employers the world over.

"For reasons related to an individual's ambition or the current employment market, people are pretty desperate to get jobs," Chris Roebuck, a British economist who has held top posts at several international banks, told The Financial Times. "Some employers are exploiting that fact, pushing people past the point where it makes sense for their health or from a business perspective."

Meanwhile, The Independent, a British newspaper, dubbed the banking internship culture 鈥淪lavery in the City,鈥� and quoted a doctor who treated bankers as saying they received 鈥渋nhumane treatment鈥� at the hands of their employers.

However, there remains at least one major difference between investment banking interns and the truly enslaved: salary. In exchange for more than 100 hours of tedium and exhaustion each week, interns at top banks often take home more than $6,000 each month, and many are hired on after graduation for jobs that pay more than $80,000 annually.

For its part, Bank of America has so far distanced itself from Erhardt鈥檚 death, while offering condolences to his family.

"The whole point about internships is to give students a positive experience and to get to know our firm, and us to know them well, so we can work out who would be the best fit to join the company full-time after they graduate," said John McIvor, head of international communications at Merrill Lynch, reports NBC.

Mr. McIvor refused to comment on whether or not it was common for interns to work all night at the bank, reports the London Evening Standard. But he noted that the workplace culture was necessarily demanding.

鈥淒o people in investment banking sometimes work long hours? Yes they do,鈥� he said.

Even beyond the high-stakes, high-paying realm of finance, internship culture has come under significant scrutiny globally in recent years as internships have become the gateway position for employment in many fields. Across much of Western Europe, high youth unemployment has brought an uptick in the number of educated young people working as interns or short-term contract workers, rather than in full-time salaried positions. As The New York Times reported last year,

Meanwhile, in the United States a blast of recent lawsuits have challenged the widespread practice of unpaid internships, arguing that young people are frequently being forced to do work with no educational value for no pay. That鈥檚 not only unethical and exploitative, they argue, it鈥檚 illegal, too.