If you want the formal apparatus, the textbook is George Borjas and Labor Economics — labour supply and demand, human capital, compensating differentials, search. If you want to understand why the field is interesting, read David Card and Alan Krueger's Myth and measurement immediately afterwards, because it is the book that broke the consensus the textbook was written to teach.
Order matters here more than in most economics subfields, for two reasons. First, this is where economics has most publicly changed its mind: the minimum-wage consensus of 1990 is not the consensus of today, and reading the overturning study before the orthodoxy it overturned makes the argument unintelligible. Second, the models are abstract enough that they benefit enormously from having real workplaces in mind first. So this path opens outside the models.
A note on mathematics, since it is the thing people most often get wrong when buying: the first six books below need none at all. Borjas needs intermediate microeconomics and enough statistics to read a regression table. Card and Krueger assume you can read applied econometrics. Manning is the only book here that genuinely requires comfort with calculus and formal modelling.
Start with the arguments, not the models
Nickel and Dimed is Barbara Ehrenreich working minimum-wage jobs and failing to make the arithmetic balance. It is dated in its particulars and remains the most-assigned book on low-wage work; read it first and read it critically. Bullshit Jobs is David Graeber's argument that a large share of paid work is understood by the people doing it to be pointless — openly polemical, not economics, and useful because it names something the models have no variable for. The job by Ellen Ruppel Shell is the most current of the three, reported across automation, retraining and the gig economy.
The long view of work
Work is James Suzman's anthropological deep history of how humans have spent their time, published as Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time in the UK and under a different subtitle in the US. It is the widest frame on this list and it makes the wage relation look recent and strange. Temp is Louis Hyman's history of how temporary, contingent and consultant work was deliberately constructed in postwar America. The Fissured Workplace is David Weil on how large firms shed direct employment to franchises, subcontractors and staffing agencies, and what that did to wages and to enforcement; it is catalogued under its full subtitle and it is the single most useful institutional book here.
The textbook spine
Work the chapters of Labor Economics on labour demand, human capital and immigration. Two practical notes. It is a standard undergraduate text that has gone through many editions, so buy the current one rather than the older printing our catalogue record points at. And Borjas's own empirical positions, particularly on immigration and wages, are contested within the field — read those chapters alongside the next stage rather than as settled findings.
The empirical revolution
Myth and measurement is Card and Krueger's minimum-wage work, which found no employment loss where the standard competitive model predicted it. The finding has been argued about for thirty years and the argument is not over; the book is the origin of the modern natural-experiment turn regardless of where you land on it. Monopsony in Motion is Alan Manning's theoretical answer: if employers have wage-setting power, the competitive prediction simply does not apply. It is the most technically demanding book on this path. What do unions do? is Richard Freeman and James Medoff's exit-and-voice account of unions from 1984, which argued the wage effect is only part of what unions do.
Skills, education and the wage structure
The race between education and technology is Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz's argument that American wage inequality tracks whether educational attainment is outrunning skill-biased technical change. Note that the edition our catalogue links is a Chinese-language translation, so check the language before buying. Career and Family is Goldin on the gender earnings gap as a problem of greedy work rather than of hiring discrimination alone; read it last, because it uses the whole apparatus above.
For adjacent applied fields built the same way, see health economics.
Follow the full ordered path here: Labor Economics: The Best Books on Wages and Work, in Order.
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