The business press announces workplace illiteracy as the "$60 Billion Problem" that threatens the competitive standing - and thus the standard of living - in the U.S. and Canada. "The problem" is said to be a population that can't read and write well enough to keep up with rising skills requirements in The New Workplace. This discourse of illiteracy renders large segments of the working population subject to an expanding regime of testing, training, and credentialing, both inside and outside of workplaces. It also holds a growing labour force of educators accountable to show "progress" in closing the gap. But "progress" seems forever elusive. The research I will discuss here explores how the creeping textualisation of work organizes "illiteracy" as a social relation embedded in the governance of work, and how everyday literacy tasks thus become the practice of "someone else's power." These pervasive elements of work restructuring, locally and globally, generate "illiterates" as a routine feature - indeed accomplishment - of the New Economy. I will use the example of work restructuring and literate relations in the trans-national auto-parts manufacturing industry, where, in Canada, the workforce is predominantly people of colour, immigrant and second or third language speakers of English, and workers with less than a grade ten education.

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