When the great joy of the discovery of oil in Persia (1908) was celebrated by the almost-bankrupted investor William D’Arcy and his entourage, the hurray’s soon gave way to concerns over the establishment of an industry, and doing so in an unfamiliar socio-political setting. Part of this venture required the attraction, training and development of a reliable workforce. This paper retraces the challenges, the struggles and the victories of the men who made up this workforce. As oil was struck in the isolated Zagros Mountains of South-Western Persia, the territory of the nomadic Bakhtiari tribe, with no large cities in the vicinity, it was natural that the British investors looked at the local tribesmen as the prime source for providing workers. Besides, the leaders of the Bakhtiari tribe had gradually yet effectively become the main negotiating party to the oil concession agreement, since they were semi-autonomous from the weak central government of Persia, as demonstrated by their prominent championing of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. If their tribe would also become the main supplier of the workforce, it would secure the stability of operations. However, this line of reasoning deals only with the British perspective. The Bakhtiari tribesmen, who, in all freedom, actively chose to leave their ancestral ways and become employed in an industry, must have had their own reasons. This paper investigates these reasons and the transformative transition from pastoral nomadism, where ‘work’ was a way of life, to industrial work, with its radically different nature of labor, organization and activity. Through field research and literary/archival analysis, this paper will discuss the various dimensions of this profound social transformation, most notably the adoption of a new mode of productive activity around which wholly new social structures and relations displaced the existing organizations of collective and individual lives. It will go on to argue that during the first stages of company activity, when the benefits of urbanism were still far away, it were mainly the disadvantages and the alienating aspects of industrialization that were experienced by these erstwhile nomads. Therefore, the paper will address the question as to why, despite the profound socio-cultural disruptions, the majority of these men remained employed in the oil industry, becoming the first generation of oil workers in the Middle East, fathering the Iranian working class that was to be shaped in the coming decades and playing an important role in its making.