[Screenshot from Blind]
[Screenshot from Blind]

A post by an employee at a major South Korean conglomerate — who says annual pay including bonuses comes to 800 million won ($599,000) — asking whether household chores should still be split equally with a spouse earning far less has stirred controversy online.

The post, titled "Even with a 20-fold salary gap, should housework still be 50-50?", appeared Thursday on Blind, an anonymous workplace community app.

The author, identified on the platform as a Samsung Electronics employee, said annual compensation including performance bonuses amounts to 800 million won, while the spouse earns 40 million won.

"We get off work at similar times and we're both busy," the post read. "In this situation, is it really right to split housework equally?" The author added: "I'm not being sarcastic — I'm genuinely curious what women think."

Most users responded negatively. "Calculating salary ratios to decide how to divide chores is petty," one commenter wrote. Another said: "If my husband used the fact that he earns more than me as a reason not to do housework, there would be no point in staying married."

Others offered more practical suggestions, including hiring a housekeeper or having the spouse quit work to take on household duties full time.

As the debate continued, the original poster added context, explaining that a recent surge in workload had made sharing chores difficult.

"The company has been ramping up production to maximum capacity lately," the post said. "They're ranking employees by overtime hours to determine performance reviews, and this is the period when I need a good review to get promoted. The bonus gap depending on your rating is huge."

"I need to put in a lot of overtime, but my wife wants me to either catch up on chores after overtime or come home on time and do them," the author added.

Samsung Electronics plans to pay employees in its semiconductor division a special performance bonus equivalent to 10.5 percent of operating profit.

According to Samsung Electronics' inter-company union, an employee with a base salary in the low 80 million won range is estimated to receive 750 million won from the memory chip division, 530 million won from shared organizations and 240 million won from the non-memory chip division.


bbo@heraldcorp.com