Did you all happen to catch Bill Clinton’s speech last night?

I know, it’s little more than great political theater, but there was one nugget that rung true:

American workers have given us consistently rising productivity. They’ve worked harder and produced more. What did they get in return? Declining wages, less than ¼ as many new jobs as in the previous eight years, smaller health care and pension benefits, rising poverty and the biggest increase in income inequality since the 1920s.

The guy didn’t just pull that out of his charismatic hat.

He may have gotten an advanced look at a new book to be released next year called “The State of Working America” put out by the Economic Policy Institute. A press release on the report was embargoed until today, but I’m guessing Clinton’s handlers got a glimpse of it early.

Here are the findings in a nutshell:

The men and women of the America workforce were incredibly productive, but more than in any previous cycle, the economic fruits of this growth eluded them. Unless current trends take an unexpected new direction, this will be the first business cycle ever recorded in which America’s middle-class families will end the cycle with less real (that is, inflation-adjusted) income than they had at the beginning.

It’s a disturbing trend and one I’ve written about before. But it’s a phenomenon that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention or stir up that much anger among the very workers who are getting screwed at a time when wealth is pouring into the pockets of a small minority in this country.

More from the Institute’s research:

Although the economy has expanded by 18% since 2000, most Americans’ household income does not reflect that growth. Quite the opposite: real income for the median family fell by 1.1% from 2000-2006. A small increase in the median family’s hourly wages (1%) was more than wiped out by the 2.2% drop in annual work hours. Moreover, whatever wage growth occurred since 2000 was based on the momentum from the 1990s recovery—wages did not improve at all over the 2002-07 recovery.

This performance contrasts sharply with the previous business cycle. From 1989 to 2000 hourly wages that grew 4.7% and annual work hours that expanded 4.1% were the biggest factors that generated real income growth of 10.5% for middle-income families.

Not everyone was left out of the party this time around:

The growth that economic statistics report may have seemed imaginary to most American families, but it was very real for another group. The people at the very top 10% of the income ladder reaped the lion’s share of the rewards of economic growth, more than 90% of all the growth from 1989 to 2006. And the higher up the ladder they started out, the greater the rewards.

For the bottom half of that top 10% (the 90th to the 95th percentile) income grew 32%. But in the rarefied air of the top 1%, income more than tripled (203.7% increase) – and in the top 1% of that top 1%, incomes more than quintupled – increasing by 425% to an average income of $30.5 million for that group in 2006.

“While most Americans were struggling, the good times were rolling among the top 10%,” said co-author Lawrence Mishel. “We have seen a large scale skimming of the benefits of growth from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 10%, and especially to the top one percent and, even more so, the top one-tenth of a percent.”

It was nice to hear a politician point out some of the things the authors uncovered.

But Clinton’s words got me thinking about a book I recently read “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,” by Steven Greenhouse, the labor writer for the New York Times.

He offers some ideas for weapons to combat wage stagnation:

“There are many strategies to address this problem, among them a higher minimum wage, greater unionization, and keeping unemployment low to increase workers’ bargaining power.”

Unfortunately, he also points out that too often the plight of the average working stiff doesn’t get a high enough priority.

“The nation’s politicians, news media, and public discourse have largely ignored the struggling worker, except every four years when presidential candidate descend on factories in Iowa, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, with TV cameras in tow, and lend an ear to the concerns of the poor working man.”

Hopefully, when the conventions are done, the campaigning ends, the elections are over, and a new president is sworn in, “the concerns of the poor working man” and woman won’t just fly out of the Oval Office window.