Yes there is, and you said it perfectly that some chose to stay and of those that did many eventually left anyway. The majority were happy to leave even if it only meant literally going next door for the same deal they had been offered to stay. Others stayed briefly contemplating their next move or waiting to find a better opportunity for their families. Many slipped away in the night, often before they had officially been freed. Others were lied to about their status or made to fear the expenses of "freedom" as described by their masters. It's also important to remember over 50% of American slaves were on plantations owning more than 20 humans and a full 25% were plantations over 50.

Directly to your question, a text that deals with all of this and more is Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery by Leon Litwick. It's an older print (1980) but is fantastic it that it A) it speaks specifically to the social/personal side of the era, B) deals with very little politics or battlefield mapping, and C) uses an abundance of primary sources from diaries, journals, newspapers, etc to express what slaves and free blacks felt and faced as slavery came to an end.

Most former slaves had only known plantation life or farming. Many continued to farm only to be impoverished by crop-lein farming. A rare tale of using income from sharecropping, a type of crop-lein farming, to build a future (and even being hired to manage the farm where he used to be enslaved) can be read [in this comment] (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fjcudp/comment/frlcgtd) I posted about the adult life of Hugh Carr, a teenage slave at wars end. It is important to note his story is an exception and not a common tale.

Much more commonly in the crop-lein system was establishment of perpetual poverty. Looking at the contract signed by Mr Carr, we can see an example of signatories being supplied with certain goods in addition to their share of the crop. Depending on specifics, these included tools, food, housing, clothing - and sometimes even seeds, prohibiting your ability to save from the previous year to avoid paying. Some stipulated you had to buy those items on credit and could not leave the contract with a negative balance, essentially creating servitude of free souls. If they succeeded in buying a small plot it didnt always mean success. Landowners of small plots would become indebted to the merchants, trading future crops for goods now (this lack of credit resulted in the farmers alliance that fueled the progressive movement of the 1880s/90s). It didn't matter where the freemen went, there were bad deals, debt, and poor whites willing to work that acted as market barriers. Top that with Jim Crow and remaining a farmer in the south was not easy; unfortunately for many, once they committed to that path they were unable to escape it.

This depends very, very heavily on how we define what you mean by 'paid workers'. I think the thrust of your question is probably captured in your expanded remarks: did newly emancipated enslaved people ever choose to continue working for the people who once claimed to own them and if so, what kind of circumstances would motivate them to do so? As with so many things concerning the history of slavery in the Americas, the answer to that question is complicated.

To the average person today, the two defining characteristics of slavery as a form of labour - as a means of getting people to work for you - are that an enslaved person can be treated in the most appalling and violent ways, and that they work without compensation, especially financial compensation. Ergo, thinking from our modern perspective where weekly wage packets or monthly salary payments are the norm, it seems sensible to think that the alternative to slave labour is waged labour - that formerly enslaved people would now need to do work, either the work they did under slavery or new work, in exchange for pay. It's eminently sensible today to think of money as the key to economic independence and so freedom from dependency. But in truth, for most former slave owners and most newly emancipated African Americans alike, a shift to wage labour was not what they hoped for post-emancipation.

For the men and women who found themselves emancipated on the plantations of the former Confederacy, where the vast majority of enslaved people lived and worked at the time of the American Civil War, money was not necessarily a tremendously valuable commodity. Whilst it certainly had its value and its place in the economy of the rural South, money was ultimately the means of facilitating exchange in an economy designed to serve the needs of the white population and to exclude the black population, even post-liberation. Having spent generations in servitude on rural plantation estates, newly freed black communities were not generally concerned with wealth or prosperity or the ability to integrate into white civil society - they were primarily concerned with preserving the positive traditions and experiences of their way of life, and securing true independence and security for the communities and families they had worked so hard to build in the face of the most violent, dehumanising oppression at the hands of white slave owners. That meant freedom from working for white people wherever possible; having their own land and their own homesteads; farming independently to produce their own food; and so on and so forth. African American communities post-emancipation were much more interested in first establishing this firm level of autonomy and security as a bedrock for their future lives and those of their children. Land ownership, not wage labour, was the goal of most newly freed people. Wage labour was simply another form of domination in the eyes of many.

But white planters had their own problems with the use of wage labour. Slavery was not just a way to force people to work for you - enslaved people themselves were commodities that could be bought and sold, and were traded in such a fashion in their millions through a vibrant internal slave trade in the United States. The ever growing demand for more and more slave labour in the Deep South in particular had created a situation where the average sale value assigned to an enslaved person was consistently increasing, over time, through the 19th century. When slavery was abolished abruptly with the end of the Civil War, the effect on the Southern Elite was somewhat comparable to the Government today making it illegal to sell houses or stocks - over night, vast sums of wealth that had accrued and been invested in human property were wiped out with no way to regain it. If you were a slave owner with debts for example, you may have just found that the property you had been able to use as collateral - as your way of reassuring yourself and your creditor that even if your financial situation takes a turn for the worse, you have the means to pay them back by selling some or all of the people you claimed to own - was gone. Wage labour could very easily be the pressure that bankrupted some estates, especially as the profit/loss cycle in the plantation economy was not always a neat one. But those who could afford to pay wage labour found the concept distasteful: in their deep prejudice, they did not trust African American people to understand the value of money or to have the inclination to work hard for financial incentive, and they recognised that the harsh conditions they had imposed on enslaved people meant that they did not need to work a great deal anyway to maintain the standard of living they were accustomed to. In addition, the nature of the plantation economy meant that it was generally a cash-poor society anyway: an estate growing cotton, for example, could pay for some or all of a service in that hugely valuable crop, which could continue to be traded on for other goods and services until someone eventually sold it for cash.

But slavery or no slavery, the plantocracy needed workers to keep the estates functioning and making a profit - especially now that the Southern elite found themselves considerably poorer in capital. And in many cases the plantation owners had one pivotal advantage over freedpeople in the struggle to shape the post-emancipation economic landscape: they controlled the vast majority of the arable land that enslaved people had access to, including the homes and any private farming plots they were accustomed to having themselves. Whilst there was a great deal of movement and a strong desire to make a point of not sticking with the same former owner in many cases, newly freed communities by and large found themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place: former slave owners or state and local governments controlled most of the land that they could use to build their own future; this cash-poor economy simply did not have the alternative job opportunities available for most people; and white society remained deeply racist and deeply hostile to the idea of black freedom even where those opportunities did notionally exist. Instead we by and large see a new system of quasi-free, coercive labour take hold on the estates: sharecropping and its derivatives. Land owners could exploit their ownership by offering freedpeople a tenancy agreement of sorts that was, more often than not, designed to keep the formerly enslave destitute and dependent on the plantation for survival. For example workers may be required to do all the work in producing a crop but only retain a fraction of the final product, usually on the grounds that the estate owner was 'loaning' them the tools to work, the land and buildings to live in, food rations and so on and so forth. There were many different ways to configure these arrangements to the detriment of the workers. These arrangements were usually based on legal one-year tenancy agreements, the timing of the expiration of which could be used to intimidate whole communities into staying in the employ of the same land owner.

The only place where you will find the widespread take-up of wage labour in the aftermath of slavery's abolition is in the British Caribbean - where it was legally mandated by the Government. When Britain legislated for the abolition of slavery in its Caribbean colonies in 1832, the British were deeply concerned about the potential economic chaos abolition could bring to the islands - and fearful of what the free African Caribbean population would do with their newfound liberty. They conceived a transitional system called apprenticeship in which all but the youngest children were compelled to continue working for their former owners for another 8 years despite being legally free people. This transitional labour system was constructed in such a way that the formerly enslaved were supposed to keep working for free for their former owners around three-quarters of the time, but for the remaining quarter would be able to work either for their former owner or for someone else for a fixed wage rate. Some planters decided to simply bite the bullet and immediately emancipate their slaves and proceed straight to a wage payment system, but most were hostile to the idea. Unlike in the United States where poor white smallholders and workers were also available to put competitive pressure on ex-slaves, in the British Caribbean the newly emancipated represented the crushing majority of the workforce and were in a strong position to demand higher wages or stop working. Caribbean planters proactively undertook work to limit the opportunities available to ex-slaves to earn an independent wage for this reason, including as independent business people, and began turning their attention to new sources of forced labour in the form of indentured servants from India and China.

Continued abuses under the apprenticeship system lead the British to abolish slavery properly and fully two years early in 1838 across the Caribbean. What happened next was dictated heavily by the availability of land: on islands with an abundance of unused land like Jamaica, former enslaved people and especially women left the estates in huge numbers to form new, independent farming communities in the countryside or more rarely to try and find work in the small but growing urban economy, whilst on islands where land was scarce and tightly controlled by the white elite exploitative wage labour or sharecropping practices took hold. But in the Caribbean, too, free black wage labour was generally the first preference of neither the recently emancipated nor their oppressors - albeit for very different reasons.