A nine-month long workplace literacy programme at a southern hospital is the setting for Sheryl Greenwood Gowen's case study "The Politics of Workplace Literacy". Using ethnographic techniques, story-telling, and carefully documented observations of workplace relations, the author brings this literacy programme to life, illustrating how classism, racism and sexism continue to be part of the workplace environment. The voices and essays of the men and women in this book, people whom society has labelled as workers with inadequate literacy skills, reveal how literacy represents not just knowledge, but true power in the workplace: economic, social, real and symbolic power.