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CURRENT VIEWS ON WORKPLACE LITERACY

In the following sections I present some widespread, popular conceptions of literacy and its relationships to work. To illustrate what I will call the "popular discourse" of workplace literacy--the common values and viewpoints reflected in currently dominant ways of talking and writing about the issue--I quote directly from policy documents, newspapers, magazines, and interviews.[1] In this way I hope to capture the voices and suggest something of the ideologies that dominate current debates about education and work. I view these voices and ideologies as a specific instance of what Giroux and McLaren (1989) have described more generally as "the conservative discourse of schooling" (p. xiv), wherein public schools are defined as "agents of social discipline and economic regulation" (p. xv), being valued only insofar as they turn out workers with the skills, knowledge, habits, and attitudes thought essential in terms of today's economy. But rather than borrow Giroux and McLaren's phrasing (or the related language of other critical theorists) and refer to a "conservative" discourse rather than a "popular" one, I intend through this choice of terms to suggest how persuasive and omnipresent and, well, popular these ways of thinking and talking about workers and literacy have become. Not only do died-in-the-wool conservatives or right-wingers adhere to this discourse, but concerned teachers and committed literacy specialists and well-meaning business people and eager students and interested academics and progressive politicians and worried parents and a host of others as well--many people, I want to suggest, who don't necessarily think of themselves as conservers of the status quo.

Workers Lack Literacy

The most pervasive and unquestioned belief about literacy in relation to work is simply that workers do not possess the important literacy skills needed in current and future jobs. Here are examples:

"Millions of Americans are locked out of good jobs, community participation and the democratic process because they lack adequate reading and writing skills," said Dale Johnson, spokesman for the Working Group on Adult Literacy. "Only leadership from the Presidential level can assure that the literacy needs of all Americans will be met." (Fiske, 1988, p. 12)
Anyone who has hired new employees or tried to retrain veteran ones is painfully aware of the problem. As much as a quarter of the American labor force--anywhere from 20 million to 27 million adults--lacks the basic reading, writing and math skills necessary to perform in today's increasingly complex job market. One out of every 4 teenagers drops out of high school, and of those who graduate, 1 out of every 4 has the equivalent of an eighth-grade education. How will they write, or even read, complicated production memos for robotized assembly lines? How will they be able to fill backlogged service orders? (Gorman, 1988, p. 56)
The Department of Education estimates that there are about 27,000,000 adult Americans who can't really read. Almost all of them can sign their names and maybe spell out a headline. Most aren't totally illiterate the way we used to define illiteracy. But they can't read the label on a medicine bottle. Or fill out a job application. Or write a report. Or read the instructions on the operation of a piece of equipment. Or the safety directions in a factory. Or a memo from the boss. Maybe they even have trouble reading addresses in order to work as a messenger or deliveryman. Certainly they can't work in an office. (Lacy, 1985, p. 10)

Such accounts are exceedingly common: The shocking illustrations of seemingly basic, taken-for-granted skills which current workers and recent graduates lack; the hard evidence that large numbers seem to provide of how many people these illustrations apply to; and the frightening implication that, given the severity of the deficits, it is almost too late to solve this enormous problem. Notice the constant emphasis on deficits--what people are unable to do, what they lack, how they fail--and the causal relationship assumed between those deficits and people's performance at work.

Articles reporting worker illiteracy often specify as well which groups among the American population will dominate in future work--that is, women, minorities, and immigrants--and then make the point that, since these groups are likely to have the poorest skills, literacy-related problems in the workplace will likely worsen:

A growing share of our new workers will come from groups where human resource investments have been historically deficient--minorities, women, and immigrants. Employers will increasingly have to reach into the ranks of the less advantaged to obtain their entry-level work force, frequently those with deficient basic skills (Former Secretary of Labor Ann McLaughlin quoted in The Bottom Line, 1988, p. ii)
The years of picky hiring are over. Vicious competition for all sorts of workers--entry-level, skilled, seasoned--has begun. Employers must look to the nonmale, the nonwhite, the nonyoung. There may be a push for non-citizens as well: Over the next 10 years . . . only 15% of work force entrants will be native-born white males. (Ehrlich & Garland, 1988, pp. 107-108)
More and more, American employers will no longer enjoy the luxury of selecting from a field of workers with strong basic skills. The demand for labor will create opportunities for those who are less skilled; the disadvantaged will move up the labor queue and be hired in spite of obvious skill deficiencies. (Carnevale, Gainer, & Meltzer, 1988, p. 2.

American employers, such excerpts suggest, feel put upon and without option; they have no choice now but to hire undesirables like the "nonmale, the nonwhite, the nonyoung"--despite their fears that such people are woefully unprepared.

Literacy Means "Basic Skills" and More

In the popular discourse there is talk of a deficit in "basic skills." Although what is meant by a basic skill is not always explained, the examples of such skills that are often given--being able to read the address on a letter, fill out a job application, decipher supermarket labels--suggest literate abilities that are "basic" in the sense of being simple and fundamental, involving the decoding or encoding of brief texts within a structured task or carrying out elementary calculations such as addition and subtraction. But it is also common to hear claims that the skills gap extends well beyond basic skills. According to this argument, the problem is not basic skills traditionally and narrowly defined, but basic skills amplified, expanded to include those more complex competencies required for an information age and in reorganized workplaces. The alarm bell is rung this way:

Qualifications for today's middle and low-wage jobs are rising even more rapidly than in the past. In 1965, a car mechanic needed to understand 5,000 pages of service manuals to fix any automobile on the road; today, he must be able to decipher 465,000 pages of technical text, the equivalent of 250 big-city telephone books. (Whitman, Shapiro, Taylor, Saltzman, & Auster, 1989, p. 46)
Research indicates that the U.S. workplace is becoming more complex--that it is demanding more and more basic skills of American workers--as new technologies and management styles are introduced. Workers are expected to do a lot more than they used to in terms of record-keeping, recording information, pulling information out of different sources; solving problems; working collaboratively with other workers; and so forth. Even now a lot of companies are finding it difficult to find qualified workers to handle those new jobs. That will probably become more of a problem in the next ten or fifteen years. (Jurmo, 1989, p. 18)
Reading, writing and arithmetic . . . are just the beginning. Today's jobs also require greater judgment on the part of workers. Clerks at Hartford's Travelers insurance company no longer just type endless claim forms and pass them along for approval by someone else. Instead they are expected to settle a growing number of minor claims on the spot with a few deft punches of the computer keyboard. Now, says Bob Feen, director of training at Travelers: "Entry-level clerks have to be capable of using information and making decisions." (Gorman, 1988, p. 57)

Here is a much-cited list compiled by the U.S. Department of Labor and the American Society for Training and Development of the basic skill groups that employers currently believe are important:

Notice that the traditional idea of basics--reading, writing, and computation--make up just one skill group of seven. The burden now placed on our "nonmale," "nonwhite," "nonyoung" workforce is very high indeed: Not only must workers master the traditional basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, they are now also expected to demonstrate facility with supposedly newer competencies like problem-solving and teamwork, competencies which often require "nuanced judgement and interpretation" (Lauren Resnick as summarized in Berryman, 1989, p. 28).

Illiteracy Costs Businesses and Taxpayers

In the popular discourse, the bottom line for concern about illiteracy, whether a deficit in basic skills or a lack of nuanced judgement, is economic. Consider the following claims about the cost of illiteracy:

Millions of employees suffering from varying degrees of illiteracy are costing their companies daily through low productivity, workplace accidents and absenteeism, poor product quality, and lost management and supervisory time. (Functional Illiteracy Hurts Business, 1988)
In a major manufacturing company, one employee who didn't know how to read a ruler mismeasured yards of steel sheet wasting almost $700 worth of material in one morning. This same company had just invested heavily in equipment to regulate inventories and production schedules. Unfortunately, the workers were unable to enter numbers accurately, which literally destroyed inventory records and resulted in production orders for the wrong products. Correcting the errors cost the company millions of dollars and wiped out any savings projected as a result of the new automation. (The Bottom Line, 1988, p. 12) Already the skills deficit has cost businesses and taxpayers $20 billion in lost wages, profits and productivity. For the first time in American history, employers face a proficiency gap in the work force so great that it threatens the well-being of hundreds of U.S. companies. (Gorman, 1988, p. 56)

Again and again, we hear worker illiteracy being linked directly to big economic losses: Due to poor reading and writing skills, workers make costly mistakes, they don't work efficiently, they produce inferior products, and apparently, they stay at home a lot. A related economic argument is that since many people cannot qualify for jobs, North America is also losing the buying power of a big segment of the population (see Functional Illiteracy Hurts Business, 1988).

Workers Need "Functional Context Training"

Given growing illiteracy, changing demographics, increasing skills requirements, and economic losses, there is much pressure on businesses to support and provide literacy training:[2]

American employers have seen competency in workplace basics as a prerequisite for hiring and viewed the accumulation of such skills as solely the responsibility of the individual. The employer's interest focused on measuring the skills of prospective employees and screening out those who were most suitable for hiring. But times are changing. Employers are beginning to see that they must assist their current and future workers to achieve competency in workplace basics if they are to be competitive. (Carnevale et al., 1988, p. 1)
Q: (USA Today ): What can management do?
A: (Thomas Sticht, literacy specialist): Business and industry are going to have to pick up a greater portion of education. It would probably cost between $5 billion and $10 billion over the next few years to establish literacy programs and retool current ones. But the returns of that are going to be tenfold. (Morelli, 1987, p. 4B)
Right now at Motorola, we're running three or four different approaches, and trying to see which one will meet our employees' needs the best. In a couple of the programs, we actually teach them what they need to know to do their jobs here, so even though their reading levels might be at the sixth grade, they're really being taught to read and comprehend documentation they could use on the job. In other places, we teach them what you would an adult at the fifth-grade level: how to read things in a supermarket, how to read a newspaper. (Wiggenborn, 1989, pp. 21-22)

In the wake of corporate concern about worker illiteracy, there has sprung up a whole new market for workbook instruction (and its close relative, computer-based instruction) and "how-to-set-up-a-program" guides--for example, Basic Awareness Skills for Exploration, Assessment, and Remediation (SchoolFutures, Inc., brochure); Math on the Job (booklet from the Workplace Literacy System); The Bottom Line: Basic Skills in the Workplace (1988); Workplace Basics: The Skills Employers Want (Carnevale et al., 1988); Upgrading Basic Skills for the Workplace (1989); and Literacy at Work: The Workbook for Program Developers (Philippi, 1991). There are even customized materials for particular industries such as Strategic Skill Builders for Banking (Mikulecky & Philippi, 1990).

Many of these guides give tips on how to relate literacy training to job tasks, thereby creating programs to provide "functional context training." Indeed, basing instructional materials for literacy training on texts that are used on the job--application forms, brochures, warning signs, manuals, memos--is now almost an axiom for designing workplace literacy programs. One major funder of such projects, the National Workplace Literacy Program of the U.S. Department of Education, recently included as part of its evaluation criteria that a proposal "demonstrates a strong relationship between skills taught and the literacy requirements of actual jobs, especially the increased skill requirements of the changing workplace" ("National Workplace Literacy Program," 1990, p. 14382).

[1]In addition to the articles and interviews mentioned in this paper, other recent examples of the popular discourse of workplace literacy can be found in Basic Skills in the U.S. Work Force (1982); Bernstein (1988); Cole (1977); Holmes and Green (1988); Investing in People: A Strategy to Address America's Workforce Crisis (1989); Job-Related Basic Skills (1987); Johnston and Packer (1987); Lee (1984); Literacy in the Workplace: The Executive Perspective (1989); Oinonen (1984); Rush, Moe, and Storlie (1986); The School-To-Work Connection (1990); Stone (1991); and Workplace Literacy (1990, October).

[2]There is, in fact, a newsletter, Business Council for Effective Literacy: A Newsletter for the Business and Literacy Community, which is published especially for the business community to keep employers apprised of developments in adult literacy and to encourage them to provide support in the field (write to Business Council for Effective Literacy, 1221 Avenue of the Americas, 35th Floor, New York, NY 10020 or call 212-512-2415 for more information). However, the percentage of companies currently investing in training and retraining their workers is apparently quite low. See America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages! (1990).

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