Workers: "Give me a raise or I'll walk"

The pendulum may be swinging back in favor of workers after years of stagnant wages and tough job conditions.

More than one in three workers say they plan to look for a new job in 2015 if their bosses don't reward them with a pay raise during the year, according to a new survey from employment site Glassdoor. The survey also found that almost half of employees are confident they'd be able to find a job matching their current pay within six months, a new six-year high.

Stagnant wages have proven to be a headwind to the U.S. economy and a frustration for workers, given that U.S. median income in May was actually 4 percent less than compared with June 2009, when the recession officially ended.

So, does the Glassdoor survey merely represent the pent-up frustrations of strapped workers? Not necessarily, as human resources nonprofit WorldatWork is predicting U.S. employees may see a median base salary boost of 3 percent this year.

The new survey results are "mirroring and rolling right along with the quarterly job growth we've seen," Rusty Rueff, Glassdoor career and workplace expert, told CBS MoneyWatch. "The confidence is translating over to expectations for fair and commensurate increases in competition."

Forty-three percent of employees expect to receive a pay raise in the next 12 months, the survey found. About half of those expect their pay hikes to amount to between 3 percent to 5 percent.

That may reflect employees having been told by their bosses what to expect in their paychecks this year, Rueff said. Still, about one in five said they aren't sure if they'll see a pay hike, which could signal a management mistake on the part of their employers, especially given the improving outlook for workers, he added.

"You always know if somebody doesn't have their pay expectations met, another employer will poach them off," he noted. "Without having an open conversation about expectations, you don't know what the trigger point is" for an employee to start looking for a new job.

The survey's findings come as the U.S. economy is strengthening, with unemployment rate standing at 5.8 percent in November. In a sign that employers expect the economy to continue growing and are keeping workers on board, fewer Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week.

For now, however, the improving labor market isn't doing much to boost employee pay. The U.S. Labor Department said Friday that average hourly earnings fell 0.2 percent in December, to $24.57. Wage growth for all of 2014 was an anemic 1.7 percent. During a typical economic recovery wages should grow at least percent.

Meanwhile, not every worker is equally confident given the disparities Glassdoor survey found by gender. More men said they expect pay raises this year than women, at 52 percent and 45 percent, respectively. (The survey was conducted online in December and based on responses from 2,030 adults, although Glassdoor notes that the survey isn't based on a probability sample and so a theoretical sampling error can't be calculated.)

Three-quarters of women also said they don't believe they're paid equally to men, while only half of men said they believed there was inequality in pay between the genders.

"Men may not see it personally, so they may say, 'It's there, but I don't see it,'" Rueff said. "This should be concerning because if your C-suite is full of men and only 50 percent believe there is an inequality and not taking the effort to try to fix something, then you just proliferate the problem."