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]