Toronto factory worker Violet Sinclair has not had a pay raise in 12 years.

It means her once mediocre pay of $11.25 an hour at a Vaughan furniture manufacturer, where she has worked full-time since 2000, will soon amount to nothing more than minimum wage.

Ontario’s benchmark rate rises to $11.25 in October.

“When you ask for a raise, they say: ‘There is the door . . . ,’ ” she says, shaking her head.

But Sinclair, who came to Canada from Guyana with her three teenaged children in the mid-1990s, wouldn’t dream of quitting.

“At my age, what can you do? Where can you turn?” says the 62-year old grandmother, who looks years younger than her age. “I am a very flexible and active person. I am a good worker. And I love to work. I just wish they would pay me for my hard work.”

Sinclair pays about $1,100 a month for her two-bedroom apartment near Jane St. and Lawrence Ave., an area where working poverty has exploded since 2000. She has tried to downsize to cut costs, but says she can’t find a one-bedroom that’s much cheaper.

According to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. the average monthly rent for one-bedroom apartment in the city is $1,067.

“I’m pretty much living paycheque to paycheque,” she says. After rent, utilities, insurance and TTC fare, Sinclair figures she has between $350 and $400 a month left to pay for everything else.

If she got a pay raise, Sinclair says she’d take a foreign vacation and send money home to relatives in Guyana when they need help.

“I cannot afford cable or internet. And I’d like to have all that,” she says. “I’d like to have a nice big-screen TV, which I don’t have. And I’d like to eat good food to maintain my health.”

For entertainment, Sinclair says she visits a cousin downtown who enjoys cooking.

“I’m grateful for that,” she says. “She even gives me TTC tokens because she knows I can’t afford very much.”

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Judith Bucknor has done everything she can to escape poverty since moving from Montreal almost three years ago. She scoured help wanted ads, retrained as a food service worker, participated in job training and landed a position as a cook that pays $18.20 an hour.

But the single mother of three teens can’t get enough hours to make her pay count. As a result, she still relies on welfare to help cover her monthly costs, which include $1,350 in rent for her three-bedroom Scarborough apartment.

“I’m earning a good wage,” says Bucknor, who works 16 hours a week cooking breakfast at a downtown men’s hostel. “I just need the full-time hours. I don’t want to be on assistance.”

She dreams of saving to buy a small house or condo “and start building a life.”

“I hate giving my money away in rent every month,” she says. “But right now, I’m living hand to mouth. Just keeping my head above water.”

Bucknor’s experience shows that it is not just minimum wage earners who are fuelling the growth in working poverty in the city. The 50-per-cent increase in temporary, contract and part-time positions in the Toronto and Hamilton regions since 2000 are also to blame, says a new report on working poverty in Canada’s richest city.

The increasing scarcity of affordable housing in Toronto is pushing the working poor further outside the urban core, where many service-sector jobs are located, adding grueling commutes to their daily struggles, the report notes.

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When Bucknor started her job last summer, she had to leave her Scarborough apartment at 3:30 a.m. and take four buses to get downtown in time to work the 5 a.m. breakfast shift.

So she jumped at the chance to buy a 12-year-old van for $3,000 last November. But her car loan adds another $200 to her monthly expenses.

“The car has taken a lot of my money, but it gives me great satisfaction, so I persevere,” Bucknor says. “I can drive to church and especially in this cold winter I have been so happy I can drive to work.”