Functional Literacy Numbers in Brazil – Potential Losses for Industries

This study presents the functional literacy percentage among Brazilian population. The objective is to indicate how the functional illiteracy or rudimentary literacy can be harmful at industries, causing material losses by rework, lack of achievements during trainings and misunderstanding tasks. A deductive method was used in a bibliographical research due to data survey. Only 26% of the population is considered functional literate, which means they are able to read long texts, follow subtitles, compare two texts, carry out inferences and syntheses as well as solve math problems, present familiarity with maps and graphics. Most of Brazilians seem to have some difficulties on those works, and especially at industries, the low level of functional literacy can represent enormous production deficit.