A common consequence of accretion onto black holes is the formation of
powerful, relativistic jets that escape the system. In the case of supermassive
black holes at the centres of galaxies this has been known for decades, but for
stellar-mass black holes residing within galaxies like our own, it has taken
recent advances to arrive at this conclusion. Here, a review is given of the
evidence that supports the existence of jets from accreting stellar-mass black
holes, from observations made at optical and infrared wavelengths. In
particular it is found that on occasion, jets can dominate the emission of
these systems at these wavelengths. In addition, the interactions between the
jets and the surrounding matter produce optical and infrared emission on large
scales via thermal and non-thermal processes. The evidence, implications and
applications in the context of jet physics are discussed. It is shown that many
properties of the jets can be constrained from these studies, including the
total kinetic power they contain. The main conclusion is that like the
supermassive black holes, the jet kinetic power of accreting stellar-mass black
holes is sometimes comparable to their bolometric radiative luminosity. Future
studies can test ubiquities in jet properties between objects, and attempt to
unify the properties of jets from all observable accreting black holes, i.e. of
all masses.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Invited chapter for the edited book
"Black Holes and Galaxy Formation", Nova Science Publishers, Inc., at pres