It is the small gestures that make or break a job.

Perhaps the position is poorly paid and stressful, but you have a coworker you are friendly with who makes the whole experience just about bearable. Or maybe you are working on a project you hate, but you get to expense fancy business lunches with no questions asked. 

Many employers know and understand that a little positive can do a lot to outweigh a big negative, and they engage with this by offering them now and then. While these supposed perks do not always get taken as such, they get taken seriously by a lot of employees. So seriously, in fact, that if they feel like they have missed out on a nice thing that their company is offering, they take serious action. Nobody wants to feel like they are missing out, or even worse, that they have deliberately been discriminated.