For the last year I've written fairly consistent economic observations of living and working on Northern Minnesota's Iron Range: There are jobs here, but most of them pay low wages and are found in the service sector, not in mining. An overwhelming majority of the region's workforce is found outside the "traditional" blue collar careers typically associated with our area, primarily in health care and hospitality.

Contrary to the stereotype of the "lazy poor," people working in these lower-end jobs work like dogs, week after week, with a very difficult path into the middle class. Their hours are long, their schedules unpredictable. Add child care woes, bad health or a blown head gasket and it can all come tumbling down. I count among these people close family and friends, and most of the people I teach in class every day at the community college. This is not hypothetical. It is plainly seen.

Now, new data from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development shows these points exactly (scroll down). Jobs are coming back to the region after the recession six years ago, but the median wage for these new jobs is below $10, which puts them more than three dollars below what's deemed a "living" wage (something Jobs Now pegs at about $13.60 per hour for this area). The new state minimum wage of $9.50 for large employers helps, in that it will push some wage growth up from the bottom, but making the leap from minimum wage to living wage is still tough sledding.

It's true that hiring has been somewhat brisk in the mining sector as well, and those are much better-paying jobs. But it's important to remember that those jobs circulate within a higher-educated, more highly-experienced slice of the workforce. The same is true even in the economically diversifying city of Duluth, where the new problem isn't recession, but stratification. People in the working poor would need a college degree or several years in a trade to have a shot at those jobs, something that can be hard to do with a family, rent and transportation issues. True, nothing worthwhile is free or easy, but when larger and larger portions of the population are succumbing to the same economic conditions, all of society stands to lose in the long run.

Further, when the most stable jobs in your economy are tied to a volatile industry like mining, you run the risk of localized economic depressions when the market falls out, which -- in case anyone has forgotten -- happens here every 10-20 years or so.

So what do we do with this information? Clearly, paying all workers a living wage is one possible solution, but one that would be politically difficult and require a new attitude about how we think about our economy and prices for the goods and services we buy (and where we buy them). It stands no particular chance of passing the state legislature. Such a proposal would require voters to maintain commitment to a cause for more than two years, something they haven't done in recent memory. So let's work this from the micro level, rather than the macro.

My pat answer this year has been "economic diversification," and, sure, I still think that's the solution. Those words alone, however, don't mean much. How do we diversify? This requires a level of public sector and private sector cooperation that has been lacking here in Northern Minnesota. First, "we the people" must decide we want comfortable, modern communities with reasonable expectations of public services and healthy private investment and employment. We already *say* we want this, but we tend to behave as though the most important thing is keeping everything the same. That's a holy disaster in waiting. Actually, it's not waiting. It already happened.

Again, there might be hundreds of possible ideas that would address diversification. The three I tend to favor are the ones I spend my time working on: higher education/workforce development, broadband infrastructure, and community "vibrancy" -- arts, aesthetics and programs that make people want to live here, not somewhere else.

The reason I spend so much time on those issues is because they are necessary to create a culture of entrepreneurship, which could include any manner of ideas from many different kinds of people -- here in the region, or from somewhere else.

That's a lot to glean from one little snapshot of jobs and wages in Northeastern Minnesota, but we stand to gain nothing letting information like this wash over us without response.