Pandemic job losses 4 times worse than 2009
Four times as many jobs were lost last year due to the coronavirus pandemic as during the worst part of the global financial crisis in 2009, a U.N. report said Monday.
The International Labor Organization estimated that the restrictions on businesses and public life destroyed 8.8% of all work hours around the world last year. That is equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs - quadruple the impact of the financial crisis over a decade ago.
"This has been the most severe crisis for the world of work since The Great Depression of the 1930s. Its impact is far greater than that of the global financial crisis of 2009," said ILO Director-General Guy Ryder. The fallout was almost equally split between reduced work hours and "unprecedented" job losses, he said.
The United Nations agency noted that most people who lost work stopped looking for a job altogether, likely because of restrictions on businesses that hire in big numbers like restaurants, bars, stores, hotels and other services that depend on face-to-face interactions.
The drop in work translates to a loss of $3.7 trillion in income globally - what Ryder called an "extraordinary figure" - with women and young people taking the biggest hits.
The ILO report expects a bounce back in jobs in the second half of the year. But that depends on a reduction in coronavirus infections and the rollout of vaccines.
Twitter starts Birdwatch to rebut false web posts
Twitter said on Monday that it would allow some users to fact-check misleading tweets, the latest effort by the company to combat misinformation.
Users who join the program, called Birdwatch, can add notes to rebut false or misleading posts and rate the reliability of the fact-checking annotations made by other users. Users in the United States who verify their email addresses and phone numbers with Twitter, and have not violated Twitter's rules in recent months, can apply to join Birdwatch.
Twitter will start Birdwatch as a small pilot program with 1,000 users, and the fact-checking they produce will not be visible on Twitter but will appear on a separate site. If the experiment is successful, Twitter plans to expand the program to more than 100,000 people in the coming months and will make their contributions visible to all users.
Twitter continues to grapple with misinformation on the platform. In the months before the U.S. presidential election, Twitter added fact-check labels written by its own employees to tweets from prominent accounts, temporarily disabled its recommendation algorithm, and added more context to trending topics. Still, false claims about the coronavirus and elections have proliferated on Twitter despite the company's efforts to remove them. But Twitter has also faced backlash from some users who have argued that the company removes too much information.
FirstBank earnings rise in 4th quarter
In its first full quarter since completing its purchase of Franklin Synergy Bank last fall, the parent company of FirstBank reported net income of $45.6 million, or 95 cents per share, in the fourth quarter. That was up nearly 40% from the $21.6 million, or 68 cents per share, earned in the same period a year earlier.
For all of 2020, FB Financial Corp. - the third biggest banking company in Tennessee - reported net income of $63.6 million, or $1.67 per diluted common share. A year earlier, FirsBank had net income of $83.8 million, or $2.65 per diluted common share. Adjusting net income to exclude merger costs and other non-operating items, net income last year totaled $141.9 million, or $3.73 per diluted common share, compared to adjusted net income of $89.3 million, or $2.83 per diluted common share, in 2019.
The results matched Wall Street's expectations.
"I am proud of our associates for their focus, commitment and success in the face of the challenges presented during 2020," FirstBank President Chris Holmes said.
- Compiled by Dave Flessner