Dionísio, M. Lourdes & Castro, Rui V. de (2007). Literacies in Workplaces: A Case Study. In G. Shiel; I. Strievi and D. Sabolovi-Krajina (Eds.), Literacy without Boundaries. Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Reading. Zagreb, Croatia 2005. Osijek: Croatian Reading Association, pp. 113-117. Disponível em http://www.hcd.hr/datoteke/Zagreb_Conference_Proceedings.pdf What is literacy for? We do our work well! Why do they want to know about our literacy? These were the questions asked by a 50-years-old woman working in a multi-national corporation that manufactures electronics components, when the workers were informed about an assessment of their literacy practices, promoted by the administration of the factory and to be developed by a university department. In this text we will describe some aspects of the literacy research project and of the following intervention programme in workplaces that was carried out in Braga, Portugal, from November 2002 to June 2004, in that high-tech factory (from now on, the Factory). The setting is a highly specialized and technologically advanced company, established in Braga for approximately fifteen years. It is also a highly complex and hierarchical organization, involving several departments apart from the assembly line: commercial, human resources, and financial departments, for example. Together with the traditional Fordist model – each individual on the assembly line doing his/her assigned work – new work methods are being implemented, for instance, working in teams (where workers supervise each other) in such terms that the workers “collaboratively and interactively design and redesign their work process with a full knowledge of and overlap with each other’s functions…” (Gee, 2000, p. 186). In this organization there are around 2000 workers (nowadays called “collaborators”), some of them working there since the Factory was founded. The workers are mainly (married) women, 85.7% of them working in the assembly line; their ages can explain different and low levels of formal education: 24.1% have less than 4 years of schooling or less; 27.8% have 5 or 6 years; 28.7%: have between 7 and 9 years (since the beginning of the 1970s, compulsory education in Portugal increased from four to six, and then to nine years of schooling). In spite of their strong (and traditional) participation in trade unions, the participation of these workers in popular associations (as reported by themselves) is rather weak. These people appeared to be very much involved in professional training in the Factory, a practice that was, by several means, strongly imposed by the administration. Due to the employment situation of the country, the fears of the workers when they were informed about the literacy survey that was going to take place were quite comprehensible. Actually, questions like those of the above quoted worker were asked by the researchers of the Unit for Adult Education (UfAE) of the University of Minho, when in November, 2002, they were approached by a representative of the Administration of the Factory, soliciting, in her words, “a programme to assess and improve the literacy of the workers”. The need for this assessment was not very clear and it seemed that there was not a straight answer as the workers demanded. In fact, the point of view of the Administration – “we think our workers have low literacy levels; we are a technologically advanced factory, so it is difficult to cope with that situation; we would like to know exactly what is going on at this respect” – was a little bit “contradictory” if we consider that the low educational levels of the workers were very well known by the Human Resources Department and that there weren’t immediate implications of that fact in the manufacturing process: the work was being done according to the norms and there were no news about product damages because of “illiteracy”. To the questions of the workers such as: “what is there about literacy? Why is it important? What are you going to do with the data you want to collect?” the answer and argument was the importance for high levels of literacy in a high-tech factory, where there was a continuous need for training the workers for ever new work demands. To address this issue, the research team shared some theoretical and political perspectives that weren’t coherent with i) a psychological perspective of literacy – with its “notion of discrete individual variable” – (Barton, 1994, p. 25) and, therefore, with autonomous approaches (according to this same author, those “which claim that literacy can be defined separately from the social context”), and their consequences in the hows, whys and ways of