Does only counting the wages of workers make the median less meaningful? For instance raising the workers' median wage could be accomplished by firing all the lowest earners. If non-workers' personal income ($0) in the 80s were included in the calculation the overall median would have been lower. Also, there's roughly 9% unemployment in the U.S. today; what would happen to the median if half of those people got minimum-wage jobs today?
ETA: The table linked by Landsburg has been called into serious question by Evan Soltas [H.T. CronoDAS]. I edited the post to leave only the table to provide context for the comment discussion of its status.
Economist Steve Landsburg has a post [H.T. David Henderson] about the supposed stagnation of median wages in the United States in recent decades. In the linked table median wages have risen for: