This paper takes as its focus the strike wave that took place in Beirut in August through November of 1908 following the Ottoman Constitutional Revolution, and the subsequent political, legal, and intellectual debates to define and regulate workers. The strikes occurred mostly in public service companies and likely constituted the first cross-industry concurrent strikes in Beirut. Port workers, gas factory workers, and railway workers all struck in the wake of the revolution, in most cases refusing to return to work until the majority of their demands had been met. The fact that these strikes took place in nearly all public industries, many of which were central to Ottoman Tanzimat policies of imperial expansion and centralization, should be understood as a product of the profound changes the workers in these industries had experienced in the preceding decades. These conditions can also help us understand how workers in public service industries came to make claims based on their status as workers, and came to be seen by Ottoman ministries, state officials, company officials, and the reading public as constitutive of workers as a class. Through a close analysis of the Beirut strikes, their coverage in press and periodicals, and Ottoman parliamentary debates on outlawing strikes and unions, this paper explores how freedom in the late Ottoman Empire became tied to social conceptions and practices of labor. Moving between Ottoman state documents, Arabic daily periodicals, Ottoman and Arabic scientific and literary journals, and French colonial and company sources, I argue that workers’ refusal to work in the wake of the revolution posed the most significant challenge to the constitutionalists’ proclamations of freedom. Workers’ decision to articulate their rights to freedom through their position as workers, positioned the workplace as the primary location in which freedom — itself a central concept to the proponents of the Constitutional Revolution — was lacking. These anxieties and struggles, both by and over workers, were cemented in the October 1908 Ottoman temporary by-law outlawing strikes in public service industries, and the subsequent permanent 1909 law on the same issue. Ultimately, this paper argues, workers’ actions and refusals to accept tyranny in the workplace forced the new CUP led Ottoman state to explicitly legislate workers’ legal unfreedom.