American workers are reaping fewer of the gains of a growing economy in the form of pay and benefits. Shareholders are reaping more in the form of corporate profits. That shift has been one of the most important economic stories of the last several decades, and it is the key to understanding stagnant wages for middle-class workers and a soaring stock market in the last quarter-century.

Here is what is less widely understood: That trend appears to be reversing itself.

It is early and the reversal may not last. And it certainly hasn’t fully undone the shift underway since the 1980s. But the numbers are quite clear that in the last couple of years workers have claimed a bigger piece of the economic pie and shareholders a smaller one.

The evidence available so far in 2016 — steady growth in wages and weak earnings for publicly traded companies — suggests that the reversal is continuing this year.

At the start of 2013, for example, 61 percent of national income went to pay and benefits for workers. But by the end of 2015, that had risen to 62.6 percent. (That said, in the early 1990s, that figure was around 66 percent.)