Is a new golden age for the American worker around the corner?

For the last couple of years, workers’ median earnings have been rising on a sustained path not seen in years.

This may come as a surprise after decades of wage stagnation, when the good jobs of an earlier industrial era — in which workers could go straight from high school to a lifelong place on the factory floor, with a pension on the other end — have largely disappeared, replaced in many cases by work with little security, uncertain hours and few if any benefits.

Still, the wage picture is looking decidedly brighter. In 2008, in the midst of the recession, the average hourly pay of production and nonsupervisory workers tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — those who toil at a cash register or on a shop floor — was 10 percent below its 1973 peak after accounting for inflation. Since then, wages have regained virtually all of that ground. Median wages for all full-time workers are rising at a pace last achieved in the dot-com boom at the end of the Clinton administration.

And with employers adding more than two million jobs a year, some economists suspect that American workers — after being pummeled by a furious mix of globalization and automation, strangled by monetary policy that has restrained economic activity in the name of low inflation, and slapped around by government hostility toward unions and labor regulations — may finally be in for a break.