I don’t know if this counts as an employee benefit, per se, but when you work at a museum, most other museums let you in for free. Sometimes they even let you bring a guest.
It’s not completely free, as the free tuition is reported to the IRS as an employee benefit, so you have to pay about a third of the tuition cost in increased income taxes.
I had a college roommate whose father was a professor at MIT. Had my friend attended MIT, it would have been free, but even at a different school, MIT provided a scholarship equivalent to fifty percent of the cost of MIT tuition.
I worked at a startup that bought the entire team lunch every day, from whatever restaurant we felt like going to. Nothing was off the table-- if we all wanted sushi, we’d all get sushi. My favorites were the days we’d go to Whole Foods and fill our baskets with goodies. I didn’t make a ton of money, but I had at least one awesome meal a day.
You need to say “I don’t like coffee, and at work I masturbate into an old sock, so it doesn’t make any difference to me”.
I worked for General Dynamics (Fort Worth) back in the eighties. They provided a large recreational area for employees then. IIRC it was around 40-50 acres, with swimming pool, several lighted baseball diamonds and soccer fields, kiddie rides, a fully equipped garage (for diy car repair) a ham radio building, a big park with picnic tabes and a campground (for RVs) with hookups, It also had a big gym and running track I think.
My company provides this (in a lobby alcove in our building at lunch… they don’t come to your desk).
I don’t know if these are rare perks, but where I work we get free grad school. I got sent to a pretty expensive private school and they covered everything; books, fees, tuition, even meals. I know quite a few who have completed their PhDs on the company dime, and a few have even gone to Harvard. We have onsite doctors that handle minor problems like colds, prescriptions, chronic visits (also free). The company has an office that will get us fleet pricing on new cars, and we have our own corporate Travelocity website that we can use for personal travel discounts. It’s mainly set up for corporate travel, but we can use it for personal if we like. Salaried-exempt still get overtime pay, even those well into the six figures (it has some limits though).
I once read a fascinating thread (on somethingawful.com, I think) about working in Antarctica.
Among other things, in the employee housing, there are free condoms provided.
All the books I can read. 
I once worked at a German-owned company that provided a full cafeteria lunch every day, with two entrees to choose from (one vegetarian) and always burgers in case you didn’t like the entree. Salad bar, desserts, the works. And muffins/bagels/etc for breakfast. It was fabulous.
It was supposedly 20%, i.e. 1 workday a week. But that was only after you kept up with your regular workload. Which took uber-geniuses about 60 hours a week.
So it didn’t really amount to a benefit. It was more of just another way to dangle a you-might-win-a-lottery-doing-unpaid-overtime carrot in front of salaried workers.
At my school, undergraduate tuition is a tax-free benefit for staff members and their dependents, graduate tuition is a taxable benefit (although the employee gets a certain amount of graduate tuition as a tax-free benefit, too). IIRC, the taxable portion of the benefit is reported on 1098T and you can take the tax credits/deductions you might be entitled to for that amount when you file.
Will also have a reciprocal exchange program with some 50 other schools such that employee’s dependents can attend those schools tuition-free, as well.
Is it tax-free at the federal level as well as state? Because about 25-30 years ago, my brother attended the school (in Connecticut) where my father taught and the tuition was taxable then.
It’s tax-free at the federal level. It’s been in the tax code since at least 1986. Was your brother still a dependent? Only a reduction for the employee, a spouse, or dependent child is tax-free.
We don’t have a state tax, so I can’t speak for that.
Oh, bummer. I hate it when that happens. My company also has a perk that sounds amazing but the technical details make it not so great. We’re in the travel industry so our perk is discounted airline tickets. The catch is that they’re stand-by status. Since most of the U.S. airlines have been downsizing their fleets and shrinking capacity so that more flights are full, it’s not that much a benefit. I just don’t think it’s fantastic to pack a bag and sit around in the airport for 8 hours before giving up and going home, so I’ve never bothered to apply.
On the other hand, we do get free parking at the airport where our HQ is. That’s a perk I enjoy and use!
I work for an airline. I feel your pain.
My agency pays for my subway fare. That’s about as exotic as it gets for a run-of-the-mill federal bureaucrat.
My daughter worked for an international airline, and the situation is much better outside the US. She has now moved to a domestic airline. Do you get the perks only on your airline or on the consortium (like Star Alliance) your airline is in.
She used the perks quite a bit. We as her parents get them also. I’m looking forward to lots of cheap travel when I retire.
The publisher I used to work for had a variation of this policy: We value your work and attendance – and that of all our employees. So if you’re coming down with a cold, or even just the sniffles, please call in sick so you don’t spread the germs throughout the office. Stay home and get better and then come back to work when you’re healthy.
It turned out the overall workforce there actually used fewer sick days than in average companies because they weren’t passing and catching each other’s germs. We’d quarantine ourselves and beat the disease early without any sense of guilt or financial stress, rather than think, “I gotta go in because I’ve got no more sick days.” an then have the three people in the adjoining cubicles catch my flu – and repeat the cycle a dozen times.
–G!
I get to work from anywhere I want. My employer will cover a monthly allowance for a co-working space, or even to buy coffee etc from a cafe if that’s where I choose to work from.
I worked for a company that got “Deer Monday” as a company paid holiday (the Monday of the weekend Deer Hunting started).
I worked for one that in addition to your vacation days, you got sixteen hours to volunteer each year. You needed to fill out a form, but your kids school counted.
There’s also a big difference in the US between “you work for an airline” and “you work in the travel industry”. As a rule of thumb around here employees of the carrier go first, employees of other carriers in the same alliance go second, and employees of travel agencies, hotels, cruise lines, and non-alliance carriers go third.
With modern internet booking, there’s usually at most a few unsold seats left over for group 1, maybe some for group 2 but probably not. And group 3 can wait days until there’s a flight with enough empty seats to get them on.
As I said in the other thread, pass-riding to Milwaukee in February is easy. Riding to Milan in July is not.