How good is this news really?

So is inflation-adjusted income really increasing as the NY Times claims, in this article's lede:

After four years in which pay failed to keep pace with price increases, wages for most American workers have begun rising significantly faster than inflation.

Or is this just more economic propaganda? To me, this is the more important part of the recently-reported wage increases:

If wages rise for only a few months, the current expansion, on the verge of entering its sixth year of growth, would still stand out as an unusually bad one for workers — indeed, the only one since World War II without a sustained pay increase.

In the third quarter, which included the early weeks of the recent pay increases, the share of the nation’s economic output going to workers’ pay and benefits fell to its lowest level in 40 years, according to the Commerce Department.

Further, the average hourly wage for a worker in a nonmanagerial position, $16.91 an hour in October, was about the same as it was in 2003 when inflation is taken into account.

What this article actually says is that the recent temporary decrease in the price of oil is what has caused inflation-adjusted wages to increase, since it’s really just that inflation has decreased, not that there has been a major increase in wages.

The article also tells us that that “income inequality” is decreasing but the statistics it cites actually say the opposite; that income of those “workers near the bottom of the wage scale” (note these aren’t the “poorest” workers) rose 0.1 percent, but that income of the top 10 percent rose at 0.4 percent. That sounds like increasing inequality to me, though apparently not as quickly as it has been increasing. And what about those poorest 10 percent of workers? They don't matter? Or do they just not fit into the Times’ nice equation, and they really haven't seen any increase? There’s no mention of them:

After years of sharply rising income inequality, the recent rise in wages also appears to be increasing pay for both rich and poor. From July through September, the inflation-adjusted hourly pay of workers near the bottom of the wage scale — those making less than 90 percent of all workers but more than the worst-off 10 percent — rose 0.1 percent.

That compares with 0.4 percent wage growth for those close to the top, those making more than 9 out of 10 other workers, according to an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Economic Policy Institute. Wage growth for both groups is likely to pick up in the final quarter of the year.

It’s also interesting that apparently the head of the Federal Reserve considers even this small increase in real wages a bad thing that should be halted through an increase in interest rates, so that American workers really can never get ahead.

Wages have risen so swiftly that some economists worry that they could push inflation up on their own, by forcing companies to raise prices. Last week, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, warned that the central bank might have to raise interest rates again. “One factor that we are watching carefully is labor costs,” he said.

So in this formulation American workers are never intended to get ahead. Apparently only the ultra rich can get ahead in today’s America as we have seen.