Portugal’s Supreme Court of Justice ordered a man to pay his ex-wife $72,000 (RM296,313.10). This is compensation for all the house chores she did during their thirty years of marriage.
Back in the day, housework was solely considered a wife’s duty. But time passes and cultures change. So does domestic roles. There are court rulings in favor of housewives asking for compensation from their ex-spouses. In Portugal, the Supreme Court recently ruled that a woman was entitled to $72,000 from her ex-spouse in January. Originally, the wife asked for at least $290,000 (RM1,184,900.01) for all the work she did for free during their marriage. At first, the court in Barcelos dismissed her claim.
She later filed an appeal with the Court of Appeals. This time ruled in her favor, granting her the $72,000 compensation.
Although her ex-husband challenged the decision at the Supreme Court of Justice. However, the court ruled that domestic work has clear economic value to the marital households.
“The demand for equality has long been inherent to the idea of justice, so it is not possible to consider that all or much of the housework in a house, of the members of the de facto union, corresponds to the fulfillment of a natural obligation, founded on a duty of justice,” the ruling stated.
“On the contrary, such a duty calls for a division of tasks as equal as possible, without prejudice to the possibility that the members of that relationship freely agree that one of them does not contribute to the provision of domestic work, in the logic of specializing the contributions of each one.”
The court determined the financial value of the domestic work performed by the woman by using the national minimum wage as a criterion.