The retail giant was estimated to have employed 2,000 people in its Bassetlaw home alone.
The bombardment of increasingly bleak announcements about Wilko has been bad news for Nottinghamshire's high streets. Stores across the county that has been the home of the retail giant's headquarters are now disappearing.
The focus now is on how those employees can be supported. The Prime Minister said this week that the Department for Work and Pensions was already supporting some of those who had been made redundant.But beyond state support, the question of course is how new sources of employment can be found for such an enormous group of people. At Wilko's two distribution centres alone, one of which is based in Worksop, all the 886 remaining employees were due to be made redundant on Friday .
Whilst clearly not on the same scale, the Wilko collapse again raises the crucial question of the scale and quality of jobs that will be available for those who have suddenly lost their livelihoods. The drastic change in shopping habits post-pandemic makes it highly unlikely that the retail sector itself will be able to absorb all the lost jobs.
With the advances in automation and an ever-increasing drive for efficiency among many private sector companies, the future of work appears very uncertain indeed. For the future, much rests on greener forms of energy production, with the STEP Fusion project in Nottinghamshire being a prime example of future industrial projects that it is hoped will create thousands of jobs.
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