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Wages at Toronto’s public libraries are going up anywhere from 15 cents an hour to $4.22 per hour after CUPE 416 and the library signed a pay equity settlement last week.

The year-long job evaluation process also set a floor wage that means the library’s 119 lowest-paid workers (shelvers and pages) no longer earn poverty-level wages.

The settlement - which is retroactive to 2004 - will be worth $20 million over the first five years after it’s in place.

The minimum wage at the library is now $10 per hour, which exceeds the low-income cutoff for urban centres.

Members will see their wages increase around three per cent annually on average.

Nine out of ten CUPE 416 members at the Toronto Public Library will get a wage increase.

Said CUPE Job Evaluation Representative Tom Baker, “There was a real interest in fairness at the table. And CUPE 416 president Brian Cochrane deserves credit for hanging tight on the wage floor issue.”