This paper examines the role of oil workers in the Lebanese labor movement from the 1940s through the 1970s. It shows how workers in oil pipeline, refining, and distribution companies developed nationalist and masculinist conceptions of the working class—which I term the “brotherhood of labor”—in confrontations with foreign capital embodied by international oil companies. It traces how Lebanese oil workers and their allies in the wider labor movement used their leverage over critical flows of energy, commodities, and capital to fight for a welfare state designed to insulate the “brotherhood of labor” and their dependents against economic uncertainty at a national scale. It shows how this imaginary shaped oil workers’ struggle to build a Lebanese welfare state around the figure of the male citizen worker, establishing a series of foundational distinctions and exclusions that remained relevant for decades: urban versus agrarian, citizen versus migrant, productive versus reproductive, formal versus informal or domestic. The history of labor and the welfare state in Lebanon is often narrated as a failure, and as a departure from historical norms. But as this history makes clear, the trajectory of Lebanon’s labor movement and welfare state fits within patterns observable in both the global North and the global South. This paper will suggest that attention to the social struggles surrounding transnational infrastructures of extraction can prompt scholars to re-evaluate our understandings of processes of postcolonial state- and class-formation.