(FORTUNE Magazine) – If you thought everyone was completely obsessed with the March job numbers, just wait. With so much riding on the job market--a presidential election and the Fed's decision on interest rates for starters--April's report (due out in early May) will be a critical test of whether the 308,000 jobs created in March marks a trend or is simply a false start. But whatever the numbers show, there's one big problem facing workers that no number of newly created jobs--white collar or otherwise--will quickly fix: the fact that wages are going nowhere.

Take the case of Tony Strickland. At age 38, Strickland, who has worked as a graphic designer for UPS for five years, is feeling worn down. Though he's happy to have held onto his job during the downturn, he hasn't had a single raise, save for a tiny cost-of-living adjustment. And over the past few months, he's attended several employee seminars about the rising cost of benefits. While he hasn't yet been able to figure out how much that will shrink his take-home pay, he knows he's not likely to land a raise anytime soon. UPS, meanwhile, recently announced record quarterly profits.

Strickland has company: In March hourly wages grew at an annual rate of 1.8%, their slowest pace since the 1980s. And that means that after adjusting for inflation, average wages were flat. (No wonder mortgage refinancing was so popular during the downturn.) Meanwhile, during the past three years the share of national income going to companies in the form of profits has been steadily rising and now stands at an all-time record. "Who's winning the age-old war between employers and workers? Right now employers are winning hands down," says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Economy.com. "And there's no reason to suspect that will change anytime soon."

Worse, unlike other economic measures, like jobs numbers or consumer confidence, that tend to bounce around every month, wages take a long time to change course. Typically companies see an economic recovery and begin to invest and hire. As demand for employees soaks up those out of work, headhunters start calling. Employees sit tight for a time but jump to new jobs when wages rise past a certain point. And after losing a few employees to better pay elsewhere, firms get the message and start handing out raises. According to economists, the lag between an improvement in the job market and employees seeing fatter paychecks can last anywhere from one to two years. That's right, years. And that's with a normal job market recovery, which it isn't yet clear we have.

Perversely, one of the factors keeping a lid on wages is the benefits workers have fought so hard to win. Consider health insurance. Over the past five years the average increase in premiums was 32%, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And rising medical costs automatically translate into lower wages. Either firms make their employees pay a bigger share of higher health-care costs, lowering take-home pay, or firms offset the increased cost by holding wages down. (Rising benefit costs are a big reason offshoring has become so attractive for many companies.)

The best-case scenario here is that productivity and profit gains keep the economy expanding. That would underpin a strong stock market, which in turn would help offset the effects of a wage squeeze on the 50% of Americans who own stock. Still, for people like Strickland, the wage juggernaut can't turn around fast enough.

--Anna Bernasek