The study, by Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, found that productivity grew by a whopping 62.5 percent between 1989 and 2010, but that real hourly wages increased by just 12 percent over the same period.

That suggests that companies are giving far more of their profits to shareholders, and far less to workers. Indeed, corporate profits are 22 percent above where they were before the recession. Of the meager wage growth that did occur, the study found, it all came between 1996 and 2002, powered by the economic boom of the late 1990s.

In recent months, we've seen heated debate over the relative compensation of public- and private-sector workers, with some arguing that the latter have been forced unfairly to foot the bill for generous benefits packages enjoyed by the former. But as EPI notes, the data show that compensation for state and local government employees rose only slightly more than that of their private-sector counterparts.

More important, both lagged far behind productivity gains. In other words, arguing about private vs. public largely misses the point: Over the last 20 years, employers -- whether private companies or governments -- have decisively gained the upper hand over employees in terms of how profits are allocated.