Pay for your own massage! How the era of extreme office perks came to an end - The Guardian

[massage]

Name: Office perks.

Age: May go as far back as 13BC, when Caesar Augustus offered his retiring soldiers a pension.

AKA: Fringe benefits.

Appearance: Fast disappearing.

Why are they disappearing? Economic reality has begun to bite. Google, for example, has laid off 31 massage therapists.

You mean Google employees get free massages at work? Not any more.


Hard times indeed. That’s not all. Up until last March, Meta employees in New York got free dinners and a free shuttle bus service home at night.

And now? Now it’s one or the other – Meta changed the schedule so the last bus leaves before dinner.

Sounds like it’s time for a strike ballot. Also, Meta took away their free laundry service.

Enough! To the barricades! Once you get used to having your dry cleaning picked up, it’s hard to go back.

I understand – it’s just that when you said perks, I was thinking in terms of holiday pay and a work laptop. Those are typical benefits, but companies – especially tech giants – have long been offering extra “nice-to-have” perks to lure and keep employees: on-site sushi, workplace gyms, wellness centres. Ben & Jerry’s gives its workers three free pints of ice-cream a day.

A day? You don’t have to eat it yourself.

And you’re saying those crazy days are over? It looks like it. After the pandemic a lot of companies tried using more perks to tempt staff back to the workplace. Google even hired Lizzo to perform a concert to celebrate a return to the office. But employees who had grown accustomed to working from home weren’t necessarily willing to endure a grinding commute just so they could spend their lunch hour tending the office bee colony.

So the axing of perks isn’t entirely about economic hardship. Well there’s not much point in paying for an in-house barista if no one is there to drink the latte.

That makes sense. And post-Covid, the perks employees are seeking increasingly revolve around flexibility.

I take it you don’t mean free yoga. At the same time, even well-paid tech workers won’t be happy about relinquishing benefits that saved them real money during a cost-of-living crisis – free rides and free laundry included. If it was part of your employment package, you’re bound to feel robbed.

Will they go elsewhere? They may not have a choice. Google, Twitter and other big tech companies are cutting tens of thousands of jobs – and that’s not baristas.

Do say: “We’re all suffering, mate – I had to pay for my own haircut last week.”

Don’t say: “Won’t someone think of the bees?”