Most corporate managers at some point have to deal with the issue of workers who aren't pulling their weight, thus hurting the company's performance.
The solution? Fire them, says JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.
"They will destroy your companies,"
he told the Columbus, Ohio Chamber of Commerce, The Columbus Dispatch reports.
The U.S. economy is performing well, but harmful government and regulatory policies are restraining growth, he said.
"We’re growing at 2.5 percent. We should be doing better."
GDP expanded 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter and 2.4 percent for 2014 as a whole, the best annual performance since 2010.
As for Washington's politicians, "I blame them all," Dimon said. "To me, they waste a lot of time pointing fingers and not collaborating."
When it comes to the difficulties many young people have finding a job, "workforce readiness is a huge issue in the United States and a huge issue around the world," Dimon said.
Meanwhile, many commentators have railed against the government's employment data, with Gallup CEO Jim Clifton writing last week that the official unemployment rate is a "big lie."
Patrick Brennan,
opinion editor of National Review Online, offers a more nuanced view.
"Clifton is wrong, or at least way overstating his case," he writes. But there isn't a single statistic that can accurately sum up the labor market, Brennan explains.
"We haven’t found a 'real unemployment rate' yet — one that can be used consistently to compare the unemployment picture month to month, year to year, and in larger historical context. Such a number, perhaps obviously, doesn’t exist."
That explains why economists use a variety of statistics to analyze the jobs situation.
"They are aware, as we all are, that just one number can’t capture what’s going on, and that the best numbers to tell the story vary all the time," he writes.
As for some of the most recent data, the economy added 257,000 jobs in January, punctuating the biggest three-month gain in 17 years.
The unemployment rate stood at 5.7 percent. But the labor participation rate totaled only 62.9 percent, barely above the 36-year low of 62.7 percent.
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