Following the meeting of leaders of the five teachers unions in
Ontario on October 14, the teachers announced they will walk off
the job before October 29, the last scheduled day of public
hearings on Bill 160, if the government does not drastically
alter the proposed legislation.
Phyllis Benedict, President of the Ontario Public School
Teachers Federation said that the union leaders called new
Education Minister Johnson to request a meeting this week. In
another example of the arrogance of the Harris government, the
teachers say they had not received a return call by the time
their six-hour meeting ended on October 14.
A spokesperson for Dave Johnson told reporters that "the
minister is still looking forward to seeing some proposals from
the teachers unions." The government says Bill 160 will improve
education quality. The unions are saying that it's designed to
take $1 billion more out of the province's $14 billion school
system. The public hearings on Bill 160, which are scheduled to
begin on Monday, October 20, will not shed any greater light on
this dispute, since the government has yet to announce its actual
funding formula to the schools. It is creating an atmosphere in
which there is no scope for "improvements" to the bill, other
than within the framework of concentrating power in the hands of
the Harris Cabinet over education funding and gutting the rights
of teachers.
Some of the key features of Bill 160 are as follows:
1) it enacts provisions to revamp the existing system of
education funding so as to remove the ability of school boards to
make independent financial decisions by eliminating their control
over the rates of taxation and placing significantly greater
controls on their ability to raise revenue and make expenditures;
2) it eliminates the existing system of collective bargaining
under Bill 100, the School Boards and Teachers Collective
Negotiations Act, and replaces it with an entirely new regime
based on the Labour Relations Act, 1995;
3) it erodes statutory protections for teachers, most
significantly by removing the statutory form of contract which is
considered the lynch-pin of the existing legal structure
governing teachers employment;
4) it provides that any position in the school system may be
designated a "non-teaching position";
5) it increases the scope for use of occasional teachers and
other forms of temporary employment of teachers;
6) it grants extensive new powers to the Minister of Education to
override collective agreements in areas such as class size,
preparation time, and the length of the school day and year.
TML DAILY, 10/97
Shawgi Tell
Graduate School of Education
University at Buffalo
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
