Having a way to easily verify jobs is the hard part. If there is valuable work that can be done by low skill workers that was easy to verify, it seems like the market would have already created these jobs. I guess Mechanical Turk is an example of that happening. On the other hand, I think there are physical jobs that could be done like painting buildings in parks, picking up trash, etc. that would be valuable to a community but where the market is unlikely to create a solution.
In the stuff I've read about the WPA, it sounds like having supervisors who cared about the quality of the work was one of their biggest problems too. On the other hand, Uber, TaskRabbit and others have found ways to quantify and judge the quality of work pretty well, so maybe there are ways to do this that just haven't been tried.
> Hughes is no basic income purist. He believes, for instance, that for this economic moonshot to be politically palatable, it would have to be tied to work. “Not just because it seems more intuitive for people,” he says, “but because work is a key source of purpose in our lives.”
The Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps are pretty close to what you are describing. Many of the parks, lakes, and stadiums in my town were built under those programs.
A guaranteed paycheck basically creates an incentive to not work very hard. Potential employers didn't look on WPA experience as being a positive thing. A Senate inquiry found that there didn't seem to be much incentive for a supervisor to expect or require good work from the workers.
If there were a way to quantify work to the point where everyone is getting paid for what they are contributing I think something like what you describe could work very well. Maybe the solution is a bunch of non-profit businesses that have the goal of creating jobs and breaking event. I think Good Will stores are supposed to do something like this.