Studies on Ottoman labor history have by and large focused exclusively on strikes. In these studies they discuss workers` demands, employers and government officials` reactions to these demands, and the settlement of conflicts in some detail. However, they usually do not examine workers` everyday experiences within and outside their worksites. Accordingly, they fail to address some critical issues about the organization strikes and the experiences of the striking workers. For instance, the question of how great numbers of workers were organized and mobilized remains unanswered. Those labor historians who tackle this question, on the other hand, tend to underestimate workers` agency. They usually refer to the workers` spontaneous actions, highlight ethnic and religious ties binding them, and overemphasize the role of one single labor leader in the whole process. Some recent studies analyzing different forms of labor activism in relation to workers` everyday experiences within and outside their worksites offer a different perspective. For instance, one of these studies demonstrates how some cultural and social spaces (such as coffeehouses and theaters) provided the workers with a convenient milieu of interaction and how these communication networks contributed to workers` political education, organization and mobilization (Khuri-Makdisi, "Levantine Trajectoires: The Formulation and Dissemination of Radical Ideas in and between Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria, 1860-1914"). Drawing on these recent studies, this paper focuses on tobacco workers who were socially and politically one of the most active labor groups in the Ottoman Empire. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all of the major tobacco processing centers in the Empire –Kavalla, Salonica, Xanti, Samsun and Istanbul- witnessed huge strikes organized by hundreds and even thousands of workers. This paper sets out to analyze these strikes in relation to workers` experiences on the shop-floor. I propose that tobacco workers’ strikes were neither organizational genius of a single labor leader nor the result of the spontaneous actions of the workers. Rather, these were the products of workers` collective, disciplined and organized activities. Finally it intends to show that workers’ collective activities were founded upon their experiences on the shop-floor ranging from recruitment process to wage payments as well as their everyday social interaction with their fellow laborers.