20 Bizarre Employee Perks Companies Once Offered

Workers over 21 at the Guinness brewery in Dublin were given two free pints of their own stout during break times and were paid significantly above market rates. Even so, workers caught drunk on duty were still punished. In 1870, Guinness built a clinic providing free medical and dental services to employees, retirees, and their dependents. The company also offered paid leave and pension funds for widows of deceased employees. Working there was akin to winning the Irish lottery.

Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford’s Highland Park plant was notorious for high employee turnover. Most workers were immigrants who barely stayed. Then, in 1914, he announced the Five-Dollar Day, which more than doubled the typical wages at his plant in the form of a basic wage plus bonus. However, in order to receive the bonus, employees had to attend Ford’s English classes and be visited by his Sociological Department, which checked their homes for cleanliness, sobriety, and thriftiness. The result? Turnover collapsed.

When George F. Johnson, who would later become president of the Endicott Johnson Shoe Corporation near Binghamton, NY, was growing up, he was too poor to go on the carousel at the local fairground. But when he became the head of the world’s largest shoe company, he installed six hand-carved carousels in the public parks near his factories from 1919 to 1934. He legally deeded the carousels so that they would remain free of charge to everyone, including the factory families and the public. During hard times, riders could bring in a piece of trash they found in the park rather than pay anything to ride.

Henry J. Heinz, founder of the H. J. Heinz Company, wanted to show that his Pittsburgh plant was squeaky clean even before there were official food inspections. He wanted to attract “pickle girls,” skilled women who worked there, so he brought manicurists in to give them free manicures every week so their fingernails would be clean for food preparation. The factory had rooftop dining gardens, indoor swimming baths, and lunchtime organ recitals. Factory tours were a tourist attraction in their own right.

At IBM, which Thomas J. Watson Sr. ran out of Endicott and Poughkeepsie, New York, the boss thought family life was worth integrating into corporate culture because it fostered loyalty and kept unions out. The company purchased country estates and converted them into private clubs featuring golf courses, swimming pools, tennis courts, and bowling alleys. The annual dues for membership in one such club were only $1 per employee and included the whole family, from the hourly employee on up to the top-level executives. IBM sponsored bands and sang-alongs from its own songbook.

The brewery in Burton-on-Trent, England, owned by the Bass family, would close for a day each year, so that between 7,000 and 10,000 of their workers, retirees, and family members could ride as many as 17 steam trains, which left every 10 minutes, to Blackpool and Scarborough at no cost. The train tickets, dinner, and even vouchers to redeem Bass ale at a pub along the way were paid for by the company. This was known as the “Bass Excursion,” and World War I put an end to it in 1914.

In 1878, Fred Harvey, who operated a chain of railway depot restaurants through the Western U.S., began hiring young women called Harvey Girls to work along the frontier line. He told their parents they could live in a free, chaperoned, curfewed dorm, get a free uniform, meals, and a travel pass. In exchange, the girls signed six-month contracts agreeing not to marry, or else they would lose half their pay. For many young women, these dormitories offered a rare, respectable way to live and work independently far from home.

Edward Filene and his brother Lincoln, who owned Filene’s Department Store in Boston, were convinced that autocratic bosses created resentful workers. In 1901, the worker group that Edward Filene founded put in place an Arbitration Board consisting solely of non-management store clerks. Workers who were fired or disciplined could appeal to the board, which had legal authority to hear testimony from workers and managers, vote in secret, and overrule the decisions of management. The board frequently ordered fired workers rehired with back pay.

In the early 1890s, John H. Patterson, the head of National Cash Register in Dayton, Ohio, attributed a huge batch of returned defective machines to poor lighting and unhygienic conditions. He installed light-filled dining rooms and provided free soups and lunches, shower suites on the top floor, and 20 minutes’ paid time off a week for women in the factories to enable them to take a bath. Young Thomas Watson Sr., who would later run IBM, worked for Patterson at NCR at that time.

In 1916, Julius Rosenwald, president of the Chicago-based retailer Sears, Roebuck & Co., instituted a pension plan that deducted 5 percent of an hourly employee’s wages and topped it off with a portion of the company’s profits. The fund bought a lot of Sears stock. As Sears became America’s top retailer, its stock price went up and up, and long-time warehouse pickers and clerks could retire with hundreds of thousands of dollars, some more than a million. By the 1950s, more than a quarter of Sears was owned by Sears employees.

Tuberculosis was once the number one killer of clerks in American offices. In 1913, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company built a 1,200-acre treatment center at Mount McGregor, New York, to which any MetLife clerk, agent, or office worker diagnosed with the disease was sent. The company paid for their treatment, provided them with open-air porches, and even grew produce on its farm that went to the patients’ tables. MetLife treated thousands of its own employees free of charge until new drugs rendered the hospital obsolete in 1945.

In 1904, John D. Larkin, founder of the Larkin Soap Company, engaged the architect Frank Lloyd Wright to create an office building for his company in Buffalo. Wright designed the building around a towering, light-filled atrium. During lunchtime, the office staff could enjoy the musical performances of a full-time organist. The office was complete with a rooftop garden, a branch library, free doctor visits, and even a basement laundry facility where employees could bring their personal garments to be cleaned during their working hours at no charge.

By the early 1920s, the swings of seasonal demand were resulting in unpaid layoffs for Cincinnati factory workers, which led to worry and strike action. In 1923, president William Cooper Procter and his general manager, Richard Deupree, agreed to provide anyone who had been working for P&G for a full year with at least 48 weeks’ paid employment each year. It was in operation during the entire Great Depression, and there were no widespread layoffs.

Pierrepont Noyes became president of Oneida Limited, a silverware company in upstate New York, after the religious commune his father had established dissolved in 1880 and was reorganized as a business. He sought to retain some of the communal values that had made his father’s experiment so distinctive by providing his workers with free childcare nurseries, communal dining halls, low-cost housing loans, and regular dividend payments from the profits of the company. Noyes limited his own salary in order to increase the amount available for employee benefits.

When the young women who worked in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1830s and 1840s took jobs in factories, it was considered shameful. To help assure their families back home that their daughters were safe and well, mill owners constructed boarding houses that were strictly supervised by matrons. They also provided education in the form of lectures, evening classes, and a library to entice young girls to the mills. In 1840, the mill workers began publishing their own monthly magazine called The Lowell Offering, which featured poetry and essays by the girls. It became so popular that even the English novelist Charles Dickens visited the mills himself to see them.

The German-American brewing families like the Busches of Anheuser-Busch and the Uihleins of Schlitz had major breweries in places like Milwaukee and St. Louis. To them, cold beer was a basic requirement for hot work that required heavy physical exertion. They had a taproom called Der Sternewirth connected to the main brewery floor, where the workers were allowed to fill up with cold draft beer all day. It was such a valued benefit that it was written into union contracts in those cities. When national Prohibition began in 1920, it ended that perk.

In 1879, George and Richard Cadbury, the Quaker founders of Cadbury Brothers chocolate, unveiled their model Bournville factory near Birmingham, England, as evidence that if you want happy, productive employees, you have to make sure they’re healthy. Cadbury’s youngest workers and apprentices were required, at company expense, to take part in morning exercise and swimming classes taught by trained instructors. Workers all received housing in garden cottages, plus access to outdoor swimming pools and sports fields. In 1905, Cadbury set up a dental clinic for its young workers and gave away toothbrushes to those young workers as well.

Phoebe Apperson Hearst, a major stockholder in Homestake Mining Company who championed its welfare programs, pushed for serious investment in the remote, dangerous gold-mining town of Lead, South Dakota. In 1910, Homestake opened a hospital offering free medical, surgical, and emergency care for the company’s miners and their families. Four years later, it opened a recreation building complete with a 1,000-seat theater, a heated indoor pool, bowling alleys, and a library, all free for miners to enjoy.

During the 1920s and ’30s, Tomáš Baťa, known as The Shoe King, constructed the city of Zlín in Czechoslovakia under the motto “let us work together, let us live together.” In addition to subsidized cottages, a clinic, and a technical school, he also constructed what was then the largest movie theater in Europe, the Grand Cinema, in 1932, and sold tickets at heavily subsidized rates for the workers who built the shoes and their families. He kept a very close eye on the cleanliness of his workers’ houses as well as their personal discipline.

In 1903, Milton S. Hershey built a chocolate company, a factory, and a Pennsylvania town to house the workers. And since he wanted the employees and their neighbors to have green space and wholesome recreation, he set up Hershey Park in 1906 as a free, non-commercial picnic ground, complete with boating, walking trails, and playgrounds. The amusement park rides and swimming pool would come later. He also paid for a school for orphaned boys with his own shares in the Hershey Company. The park he gave outgrew the century that built it.

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