The era of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) was characterized by a massive transformation of infrastructure, an increasing emphasis to maintain the legitimacy of the state and the Sultan, as well as the consolidation of modern state formation which marked the 19th century Ottoman Empire. This process has mostly been narrated from a top-down perspective, excluding the role of lower classes. This perspective have also been upheld by the Ottoman labor history studies, especially concerning the period preceding the Revolution of 1908, which have mostly concentrated on avowed, violent, collective forms of struggle, i.e. the strikes, making the agency of the workers invisible. However, as we shift our focus to alternative ways of discontent, such as the petitions, we could come across a rich repertoire of working class struggle in this period. This paper, based on primary documents, will examine how Ottoman port workers and the workers of the Imperial Dockyard in Istanbul effectively used and manipulated the institution of petition-writing to such an extent that it became an arena of struggle against the state and/or foreign companies. Although it was a traditional practice, the use of which, at most times, was encouraged as a legitimate means of complaint by the state authorities, the workers so aggressively and efficiently exploited it that the authorities came to see even this practice as a form of contention against the system. Through these petitions, we will see how the workers utilized the conflicts and contradictions among the elites, how they manipulated the very rhetoric which elites used to draw upon to maintain the loyalty of the subjects of the state, and how they compelled the elites to meet their demands. They also show that the public ceremonies, in which these petitions were supposed to be collected by the Sultan, such as the Friday Prayer Ceremony, came to be seen as an opportunity to show their discontent and to promote their rights and interests against the state, transforming some of the most symbolic places designed to consolidate the Sultan's hegemony into an arena of struggle. Thus, the petitions of the workers offer us a fertile area to reconsider the agency of the working classes in the making of Ottoman history and to rupture the relations of dominance between the workers and the elites through the "history from below" perspective.