On August 8, 1904, John Achzener met a man on the street in Baltimore who asked him if he “wanted to go along with some other men to Chicago to work as butchers at $ 2.25 a day.” After inquiring if there was a strike and being assured that there was not, Achzener accepted the offer and boarded a train for Chicago. When William Rees, a weaver living in Philadelphia, needed work, he would walk from one employer to the next seeking a job, sometimes traversing four miles or more on his rounds. At other times he would get lucky and “stumble in just when they need[ed] a weaver” (Licht 1992, p. 1). In December 1915, the superintendent of the Robesonia Iron Company, located in Pennsylvania, wrote to Thomas Armato of the Industrial Labor Agency, an employment agency in Brooklyn, to inform him that “we expect to extend our operations soon, and will likely want more men. At our quarry we have mostly Italians, and here nearly one half foreigners, of whom about one half are Italians and one half Slavonians.”

These transactions between employers and job seekers, and millions of others like them, were all part of the operation of American labor markets during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Economists often use the term “market” to describe a group of buyers and sellers of a particular good or service or to refer to the transactions that take place between these buyers and sellers.