Following the conceptual reorientation within economic geography since the 1980s, Anglo-American scholars have started to move questions of employment centre stage. In particular, calls for a "Labour Geography" have emphasized the role played by workers in actively shaping the landscape of capitalism, not least through the necessity of social reproduction. This introductory paper argues for a similar effort within German-language geography, an effort which should be sensitive to previous work within traditional German-language "Labour market geography", yet adopting a wider notion of work and including perspectives hitherto neglected. We start with an overview of the shift towards a "Labour Geography", giving a broad outline of the themes and issues covered by scholars working from this perspective. The second part seeks to put the changes into a wider disciplinary context, situating the heterogeneous research conducted under the label "Labour Geography" within two different heterodox research paradigms. Arguing that "Labour Geography" constitutes a field of enquiry that reaches beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries of human geography, the paper concludes with an editorial summary of the individual contributions to this theme issue.