These days, a visitor to the offices of a Midtown-based magazine might notice industrious workers scribbling away with a wide variety of ad-hoc writing utensils. In times of belt-tightening, pens have become an endangered species.

“They’ve started rationing office supplies to a ridiculous degree,” says an employee, noting that things like pens and notepads are now kept in a locked cabinet, lorded over by the office manager.

“People so dread having to go all the way to the office manager to ask permission to use a pen that I see co-workers using Sharpies and crayons instead,” says the employee, who asked not to be named.

At one local television station, disappearing milk is the issue.

“They’re rationing milk to some depart-ments, and not others,” says an employee. “They just stopped [providing it.] We had to ask why, and they said it would save money. We said, ‘Yeah, but how much?’ and they said, ‘A lot. You wouldn’t believe it.’”

Welcome to the recession-era workplace. While much attention has been paid to large-scale cost-cutting — layoffs, mandatory furloughs, schedule reductions — also taking a hit are some of the small perks office workers have come to take for granted, from bottled water and teabags to expensed meals and cabs.

In a CareerBuilders survey of hiring managers last year, 34 percent of respondents planned to cut back on “special office perks” such as coffee and discounted vending machines. And no perk is too small to have escaped the ax somewhere.

“The stupidest thing they cut here?” snitches an employee of a major Midtown publishing house. “No half-and-half for our coffee. They give us whole milk and skim though, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.”

Sometimes saving money is just a matter of switching to the store brand. At a Houston NPR affiliate, the soap, creamer and sugar is now generic — plus employees can no longer count on company-provided Tylenol or aspirin when funding worries cause a headache.

Law firms, famous for their perks for overworked associates, have been among those cutting back. In October, Quinn Emmanuel started charging for soda in its New York office; before that, Foley & Lardner raised the soda prices on their office vending machines from 75 cents to a dollar.

And the Chicago law firm McDermott Will & Emery endured a round of Web buzz in March, when an internal memo about cutting free coffee was leaked to a blog, along with the protests of a partner who argued that such a move “sends a message of desperation” — and accidentally sent his e-mail company-wide.

No water for you!

Peeved employees from other industries have likewise leaked internal memos re: cost-cutting, broadcasting their companies’ penny-pinching ways to the world. When things got tight for Reed Business in February, for example, a memo announced a consolidation of the offices’ physical space — not only would there be “fewer offices,” but “public spaces will be reduced in size.”

At least they didn’t have to share one copy of a magazine with the whole office: a Harper’s Bazaar memo cut out office magazine subscriptions — until now considered a necessity by those working in magazine business. Now, one copy of each magazine is purchased and kept in a library, where it can be checked out. Staff was also asked to reduce use of messengers and discouraged from printing and color copying.

Printing habits have likewise changed at the Manhattan offices of one international financial institution, where the network now automatically defaults to 2-sided printing. In other changes, no personal calendars or bottled water can be ordered as office supplies, and workers need to burn the midnight oil until 11 p.m. to get a car service home, rather than 9 p.m.

For some companies, perks aren’t only a draw for potential employees — they’re a way to send a larger message about the company’s culture and the way it wants to be perceived. Cutting them can be a blow to their public image. Google and Condé Nast serve as appropriate bookends in this case.

Google has become known for being a corporation-as-parent, with subsidized day care, free cafeterias and snacks and other perks designed to create a comfortable place to put in extra hours. But even the search-engine giant has tightened its belt; last year the Chelsea office cut back the hours of its free cafeteria and snack services, and in March some of the famed cafeterias in the Silicon Valley Googleplex were closed altogether.

Condé Nast’s perks, on the other hand, seemed to be designed for its employees to keep up the lifestyle that their magazines broadcast. So entrenched were they to company culture that it took management consultants McKinsey to figure out that the free Red Bull, Orangina, and Fiji water in the company fridges were probably an unnecessary expense. Now there’s no more expensing $15 a day in lunch, fresh-cut flowers for editors’ desks, or spa services to entertain clients. Frivolous town car usage and fancy hotels for editors during Paris Fashion Week are frowned upon.

Making choices

While in many cases the only casualty of cutbacks is workers’ caffeine levels and/or sense of entitlement, in some cases, like rationing office supplies, it can lead to shortages that complicate everyday tasks.

“[Office-supply] orders have to be approved by two management levels,” gripes one employee of a state hospital. “To use colored paper, you have to explain what color you need, and why you need it. I took my kid’s craft supplies to work so that I would have things like colored pens.”

An employee at small market research company in Manhattan reports, “For a while, I went without a pad of paper, writing on the backs of printed sheets. I kept asking when we were going to order a new box of pads, but gave up after a while.” She’s resorted to purchasing her own notebooks.

Other workers complain of smaller headaches. An employee at Bank of New York Mellon complains that tossing out your lunch requires a bit more effort than it used to, ever since the company stopped providing trash bags in trash cans. “Now, they have a ‘wet trash’ can in each area and only ‘dry trash’ can be placed in trash cans at desks,” says the employee, who’s not convinced by the proffered reason that the change is an effort to be Earth-friendly. “All employees view it as just how cheap Mellon is.”

Generally, workers appreciate that cutting the small stuff comes down to “choosing between some of these things and keeping one more person employed,” says Paul Baard, a professor at Fordham and organizational psychologist. But, he adds, our basic need for autonomy causes us to feel irritated by what feels like nickel-and-diming.

“That’s why when [employers] make the extra effort to include people” — explaining the budget savings — “it goes a long way. Otherwise, people get unmotivated even though it’s not a big deal.”

To Nick Farr, a business analyst with staffing firm Robert Half International, cutting back on little things, which tend to “disappear very suddenly” at times like this, is penny wise and pound foolish.

“It’s really short-sighted,” he says. “For example, how much productive employee time is wasted by employees taking a break to fetch coffee from somewhere else when a cup of coffee could be had in the office?”

On the bright side, though, he notes that as employers realize this — and as we ride out the current wave of economic malaise — the pendulum is likely to reverse.

“Office perks will be back,” he says.