Krueger (1999 Krueger, A. B. 1999. Measuring labor's share. American Economic Review, 89: 45–51. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) provides a measure of 'raw' labour's share for the US post-war economy based on Mincerian regressions. He finds that raw labour's share fell by over 8 percentage points from 1959 to 1996. We provide an alternative estimate using direct observations on the wage rates of raw labour units, i.e. those with 8 years of education or less; aged 16–18 years. Our measure of raw labour's share is considerably higher on average than Krueger's. Furthermore, our measure rises during the later part of the sample and is over 22% by 1996.