As the economy has gotten better the last five years, employers have had more and more job openings, but have been sorely reluctant to accept that it’s not 2009 anymore in terms of what workers they can hire and at what wage.

Yes, unemployment is still elevated, but workers aren’t in nearly as desperate a position as they were then. So to get the kind of talented people they want, employers are going to have to pay more (or offer better benefits or working conditions) than they would have not that long ago.

To see what that looks like on a micro level, I wrote this summer about the trucking industry: Companies are taking a financial hit because they don’t have enough truck drivers — an event that comes after a decade in which truckers’ inflation-adjusted wages have actually fallen slightly.

In effect, there is a standoff between Corporate America and America’s workers. Businesses see demand for their products and want to expand. After years of stagnant wages, workers aren’t prepared to accept these jobs on the terms they are being offered.

Eventually some employers will decide that they are leaving too much business on the table by not offering the pay and benefits and training that will fill their vacant openings. If that happens on a wide enough scale, it will mean that the long-awaited gains in wages for ordinary workers will finally start to arrive.

There are some early hints that this day is coming soon. In the National Federation of Independent Business survey of members released Tuesday, 22 percent of small businesses reported increasing compensation versus 2 percent that said they reduced pay. Their outlook for pay increases in the coming months rose. The November jobs numbers released last week showed a 0.4 percent rise in average hourly wages for private sector workers.

All this is fragmentary evidence, and after years of stagnant wages, we’ll need a lot more solid proof that something has changed before proclaiming a wage boom has arrived. But in this standoff between businesses that want high-skilled workers for minimal pay and workers who want to see raises, one side has to give.