It's a living

Yesterday I went out to dinner with my coworker and discovered that she makes less than me.

I make, after taxes, about 1.1 million won a month, which is about USD$950, for working 12 hours a week. (I used to make a couple hundred dollars more when I worked 22 hours a week.)

My coworker, who works full time, makes 990,000 won after taxes. That's about USD$850.

True, she's an "intern", which is just a fancy term for "working on contract, with no guarantee of employment after this year, making 80 percent of what a first-year employee would make." (Brilliant, whoever thought of that and implemented it at my office last year.) Even so. If she makes 80 percent of a first-year employee... I really don't know how people can live on that in Seoul. (See how I avoided doing math there?)

According to this international salary calculator , which could be total crock for all I know, the cost of living in Seoul is higher than in Washington, DC. More specifically, if I were making $850 a month in DC (or $10,200 a year), I'd need to make $13,566 in Seoul for a comparable wage. (No math, I told you.)

According to a survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, which could be a baldface lie for all I know, Seoul is the seventh most expensive city to live in. It outranks New York City (#12) and San Francisco (#38). It's still behind Tokyo (#1), London (#2) and Moscow (#3), though. (The survey covers 144 cities and measures the comparative cost of over 200 items in each location, including housing, food, clothing, household goods, transportation, and entertainment.)

Bottom line: I really don't know how people survive here, if my office's salary system is any indicator. My coworker did say that our office is known for its ungenerous wage scale. She also said that employees at big corporations make a little more, but often work until 10 or 11 at night. Which no one at the Foundation does.

If you're single and either living at home or renting a cheap place with someone, I could see managing all right, but for people with families, I just don't know. No wonder most couples are dual income. And no wonder the birth rate is dropping.