Like it or not, US companies don't have any obligation to be a social safety net for their worst performing employees.

I don't know why you have been downvoted. You can completely agree that there is a subset of employees that need to be removed as they provide no value or even negative value. However, using the same term as sweeping up dust or throwing out garbage for putting people on the dole unexpectedly is definitely a funny euphemism

If I line up a random group of 100 people at the average company, I can almost guarantee you that there is at least one who isn't doing his part. As someone who has worked with some of these people (and seen them laid off in rounds of performance-based cuts), I can tell you that some people deserve to be sent to unemployment. Yep, some good people will get hit too, but from my experience a good middle management layer can identify the low performers with a great deal of accuracy.

In my industry, and having to make the decisions to fire people, our worst 1% not only didn’t pull their own weight, they were a negative contribution. Getting rid of them and not replacing them actually put us ahead.

In most cases the employee wasn’t a bad person, they just weren’t able to satisfactorily do their job and weren’t willing to accept reassignment to a job we felt they could do.

>a good middle management layer

Fairy dust is more real than that.