Clara M. Beyer

Clara Mortenson Beyer (April 13, 1892 – September 25, 1990) was an American labor economist and workers rights advocate. She worked under Frances Perkins at the United States Department of Labor during the New Deal era, and was instrumental in implementing minimum wage legislation via the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Early life and education

Clara Mortenson Beyer was born on April 13, 1892, in Lake County, California. She was the sixth child of nine. Her parents were Danish immigrants, Mary Frederickson and Morten Mortenson. She served as an instructor at UC Berkeley for one year before agreeing to teach labor economics at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1917. Not long after the beginning of her time at Bryn Mawr, Beyer met Felix Frankfurter, a then Harvard University faculty member and future Supreme Court Justice, who had come to Bryn Mawr in order to deliver a lecture. He was impressed with Beyer and asked her to come and work with him in Washington, D.C., on the War Labor Policies Board, and she accepted his invitation. In that position, Beyer established procedures, set minimums, and went so far as to physically go to mercantile houses at the end of the daily shift and inform clerks about the District of Columbia's minimum wage.

She was buried in Arlington National Cemetery beside her husband, Otto, who died in 1948. Her papers are held by the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University.