Working for minimum wage? You’ll see a pay bump starting today

Ontarians earning minimum wage should expect a slight boost to their paycheques starting Tuesday.
On Oct. 1, Ontario’s annual inflation adjustment will boost the minimum wage, but it will still remain below what advocates have called for, especially as the cost-of-living in the province’s urban centres remains high. 
Here’s how much you could be making starting this week. 
The general minimum wage, which applies to most employees, will increase from $16.55 an hour up to $17.20 an hour starting Oct. 1 thanks to an annual adjustment for inflation. That boost includes liquor servers, who until 2021 were subject to a lower minimum wage.
For all workers, tips and gratuities are not considered wages, and are not counted when calculating the minimum wage pay under the Employment Standards Act.
The student minimum wage, which only applies to students under the age of 18, will increase to $16.20 per hour. 
People who work from home will be entitled to $18.90 per hour. These jobs include answering calls for a call centre, sewing clothes at home for a manufacturer and coding for a tech company but do not include domestic workers. Students under 18 who work from home are also entitled to this pay rate.
The minimum wage for hunting, fishing and wilderness guides are paid based on blocks of time instead of by the hour. For those employees, if they work less than five consecutive five consecutive hours a day, the minimum wage is $86 but that increases to $172.05 if they work five or more hours in a day, whether they are worked consecutively or not.
For those in some industries, a minimum wage hike won’t come until for a few months. Workers in federally-regulated private or public sector jobs won’t see a bump in their minimum wage until April 1. That includes workers in private industries, such as those in banking, air transportation, First Nations band councils and most federal Crown corporations, as well as those working in the federal public service.
The federal minimum wage last increased on April 1 of this year, is currently $17.30 an hour and is indexed to the consumer price index. 
For workers in the Greater Toronto Area, they would need to earn $25.05 an hour to make ends meet, according to figures published by the Ontario Living Wage Network last November. That means minimum wage workers in the GTA — even after this current inflationary increase to the minimum wage — would need a 46 per cent wage boost to meet the living wage from last year. 
A separate report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in July 2023 found that workers would need to earn $33.60 an hour to afford a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto — nearly double the newly increased minimum wage.
The cost-of-living, driven by food and rent costs, continues to weigh on the wallets of low-income Canadians. A report from Feed Ontario in September found that over a million people visited a food bank in 2023 to 2024, even as one in six of those visitors were employed. That record number of Ontarians who turned to food banks came even as the Bank of Canada cut its overnight lending rate for a third consecutive time in early September, citing falling inflation.
The minimum wage was created to prevent employers from being able to exploit workers, setting a floor for the minimum wage was a way to create decent jobs, explained Anil Verma, a professor of human resource management at U of T’s Rotman School of Management. 
Verma, who served on a provincial advisory panel on the minimum wage in 2013, added that, in his opinion, “no one should have to work a minimum wage job for their entire life.”
“Minimum wage jobs serve a purpose, and they should serve as a bridge (or) as a stepping stone for young people and other people who maybe lack skills or have other personal constraints,” Verma said, arguing that otherwise, minimum wage jobs create a “kind of poverty trap” without the ability to earn better wages over time.
“That should be the goal of public policy, to create minimum wage jobs that would serve as training grounds (for the) acquisition of skills and a stepping stone to a better career.”