For a long time, a number of people–the Economic Policy Institute and yours truly–have pointed out that workers have not been getting much out of the rise in productivity. Today, The New York Times wakes up to that phenomena with a front-page story:

With the economy beginning to slow, the current expansion has a chance to become the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages for most workers.

That situation is adding to fears among Republicans that the economy will hurt vulnerable incumbents in this year’s midterm elections even though overall growth has been healthy for much of the last five years.

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”

But the Times’ is simply incorrect when it states the following:

For most of the last century, wages and productivity — the key measure of the economy’s efficiency — have risen together, increasing rapidly through the 1950’s and 60’s and far more slowly in the 1970’s and 80’s.

That’s false. Since about 1970, productivity has climbed steadily while the median wage has diverged from productivity. The minimum wage would be somewhere between $18-$19 an hour if wages had kept pace with productivity over the past 30 years.