Being treated equally to the people around you is a human right, should be anyway.

Because being treated inequally, deprived of things people around you take for granted, can damage oneself seriously.

So if I work at a company where the CEO gets a corporate jet, that jet becomes a "human right"?

No, but if you work at a company where even the janitors get free lunch, you should get free lunch.

But if the programmers that get free lunch are working for below-industry wages, and the data-entry people are getting industry wages, isn't it the people with the free lunch that are getting screwed over?

I find that compensation means how much your work is valued. Workplace perks usually mean how much that company wants that the people working there enjoy the place.

For me they are two different things. Although having different salaries/compensation for different kinds of jobs is perfectly normal and is hidden from people's view by the privacy that is applied to how much people make..... the workplace perks like free lunch and bus are totally visible (how could they not be?) and create a social divide between people that once accentuates their grief/delusions/issues and contributes to make people feel "different" in the human level.

They are, so the only honest option is to pay industry wages as a rule and provide (or not provide) a reasonably comparable level of perks to everyone.

Otherwise drama.

they're both getting screwed. getting screwed by capitalists is not a zero sum economy.

Someone does not know what a zero-sum transaction is.

From what I gather from the comments, he didn't work for Google, he worked for a contracting agency.

So if everyone is treated equally, with the same pay and the same benefits, why would anyone choose to work a hard job? What incentive do you have to spend years and considerable amounts of money learning a skill set when you could just be an artist or something instead?

Sorry, but not everyone's work is worth the same. It isn't fair or equal, and it shouldn't be.

I think the discussion proposed in the article is around workplace perks, not compensation.

Perks are compensation.

I'll assume that if you win a court case your compensation you'll be a truck of soda cans then.