Contemporary global corporations face a significant dilemma regarding internal governance. On the one hand they want people who are geographically, culturally and temporally remote to work together to generate new knowledge and accomplish routine work - they want to generate multi-disciplinary, globally dispersed communities of practice. On the other hand they want to exert control over this divergent, dispersed, innovative and creative workforce. Here I argue that workplace education plays an important but often invisible role in mediating individual and group autonomy, and central control, in global networks of production. Workplace educators (working in government training institutions, commercial organisations, in-house human resource departments and Unions) intervene in work practice at local (but not necessarily geographically local) worksites in unexamined ways. They help create new (face to face and virtual) learning communities, certainly, but they also help to exert centralised corporate control over work practice, work relationships and work identities, in unobtrusive ways.