As much as Xue Mingjian trumpeted the benefits of “labor kindness” in his creation of an enterprise welfare community at the Shenxin Number Three Mill in Wuxi, only a handful of other factories pursued Xue's strategy to fuse scientific management with Confucian benevolence. A few large-scale enterprises in Shanghai under British, Japanese, and Chinese ownership – such as the plants operated by the British American Tobacco Company, Naga Wata Textile Corporation, the Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company, and the Commercial Press – did offer employees limited nonwage benefits. In the thousands of small manufacturing workshops in Chinese cities, owners at times extended certain benefits to apprentices and employees. Even labor contractors were nominally responsible for providing workers with housing, food, and clothing. However, the fact that owners and managers of large factories housed workers in a primitive factory dormitory or offered simple meals in a dining hall – fees for which were commonly deducted from a worker's pay – should not be overemphasized as the “sprouts” that eventually grew into the work-unit structure of the 1950s. In most cases in the 1930s, managerial provision of housing and food simply helped to ease the inconvenience of journeying back and forth from a distant dwelling for meals and rest. Such examples of nonwage benefits were qualitatively different from the kind of enterprise welfare measures that became standard practice in large state-owned enterprises by the late 1940s.