On Thursday, 30 March 1911, a tobacco factory in Istanbul fired twenty-two workers, when they refused to accept a cut in their wages. The next day, some of the workers in the factory announced that they were going to declare a strike. In response, the factory administration informed the nearby police station of the incident and several police officers quickly arrived at the factory. The officers induced workers to resume their work and asked foremen involved in the unrest to accompany them to the police station. Once in the station, the foremen were reminded of their right to go on strike but also warned not to hold illegal meetings. Why did the officers choose the foremen to accompany them to the police station? Was this an exceptional occurrence or not? How did workers and employers in different industries and government officials view foremen? What was the role of foremen in controlling, organizing, and mobilizing workers? Focusing on tobacco and transportation industries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman Empire, my paper sets out to explore these questions. In doing so, it seeks to shed some light on asymmetrical power relations between capital and labor in these two industries and on how these relations were reproduced, reinforced, and sometimes contested by foremen.