re: Why/when did jobs need to have all these benefits and perks attached to them?

Interesting history here, going back to WWII wage and price controls. In WWII,Roosevelt instituted wage and price controls "for the war effort." Given that a large number of men left the workforce to go to the military, there was intense competition among employers to attract workers. Since they could not do that by raising wages, they did so by offering non-wage benefits like health insurance. After the war, Congress decided they liked employers offering all these benefits and changed the tax code so that the value of the benefits would not be considered taxable compensation and would not be taxable for the employer either. After that, it became cheaper to raise compensation by offering more lucrative benefits than by increasing salaries by the same amount. Thus, the current crazy system was born.