Fulltime employees at Google are basically the same as any other employee. They get the same benefits, can eat the free food, and generally I haven't seen any serious discrimination against them for being "not engineers". However, some of the things you've mentioned (e.g. building maintenance) are often done by contractors or outside firms, and for them things are often very different.
Red badges and the equivalent elsewhere make up an astounding amount of who actually works at most major companies. They’re the poor and working class to the gentry (FTEs) and the elites (FTE executives).
They’re paid 50% of what their contracting agency is paid for them, they have poor benefits if at all and live in a constant consciousness about who is higher class than them. They attend different Christmas parties, for goodness sake.
If I have $100 to pay someone in the US, about 25% of that will go to "fringe" (taxes, health insurance, unemployment/worker's comp, 401k match, PTO/sick, etc) and that percentage is probably higher for lower-paid employees. So, start with $100, fringe expenses take $25-30, agency middleman profit/overhead/flex-risk takes maybe 20% ($20), and the end worker gets $50-55 out of the $100 the original company is paying for them.
That the end worker is getting ~50% isn't that crazy to me. If directly employed, they'd be getting only about ~65-70%. (which is less than the direct fringe ratio because someone has to fade the PTO/sick/hiring lag flex to ensure the trash cans get emptied consistently and the agency is doing that in the other case).
All those taxes are already being paid. It’s to ensure that the contract worker gets worse insurance and next to no benefits and therefore costs less, and also so that you can get rid of them whenever you want for someone even cheaper.
I was responding to "They’re paid 50% of what their contracting agency is paid for them" and the contracting agency is paying those fringe items out of "what their contracting agency is paid for them".
While I'm hesitant to give in to my inner cynic, the anecdote about walking into the local, on-site IT in the post about his first day at google linked in the first post, especially stood out in my mind. Someone's manning that walk-in station - do they have the same benefit as the engineers? Half of which allegedly have PhD's, mind you.
It’s a person who commutes from Tracy and lives with 5 other people in a 3 bedroom house and doesn’t have health insurance because they can’t afford the subsidized rate nor the deductible. Their mask is impenetrable and only drops once they pull into the drive thru in Hayward for some McChickens to tide them over for the last hour of the commute.
Some services are, like you said, obviously done by contractors, but I can't help to think that you rarely see any testament from other employees than engineers to how great an employer Google is, or was, and if you're looking at the bigger picture - while Google's up until recently practically been drowning in cash, they're at the same time outsourcing CS to sweatshops like Teleperformance.
