"Often it was three minutes here, two minutes there—forms, directions or a memo that showed where you had to drive a forklift truck to pick up something," says Larry Mikulecky, an Indiana University education professor who studies assembly lines and convenience stores to discover "real world" literacy demands.

Those demands, Mikulecky has found, mostly fall between the 9th and 12th Grade in reading difficulty. But 15 per cent of the time, they're higher.

Most of Canada's working illiterates can't handle even the simple materials, the Southam survey shows. For example, roughly one in five workers picked the wrong explanation in the survey when asked to explain why a dock-radio was being returned for repairs.

Yet hiring new workers isn't possible for most industries; an existing workforce that's just entering middle age and a dip in new entrants means about 85 per cent of Canadians working today will still be working by the year 2000.

"Employers can't fire all the workers because they're old-fashioned and hire new ones, because the turnover wouldn't be there with our demographics," says Judith Maxwell, chairman of the Economic Council of Canada.

Maxwell says studies show Canadian workers are flexible and employers can be forward looking. They'll have to be. Between 1971 and 1981, technological Flange cut employment for workers with less than Grade 9 education by 15 per cent and by eight per cent for high school dropouts.

Computer projections by the council show the change accelerating, with job opportunities slashed in scores of occupations and new types of jobs created.

Says Maxwell: "We're becoming a society that has to live by its wits more than by its strong badges." Or as Alfred Fitzpatrick, founder of Frontier College, wrote nearly 70 years ago, when urging industry to provide 40 minutes a day for literacy lessons: "The results should prove remunerative to the company as well as to the men."