Robert Shiller has proposed what amounts to a vast federal make-work program:

Why not use government policy to directly create jobs — labor-intensive service jobs in fields like education, public health and safety, urban infrastructure maintenance, youth programs, elder care, conservation, arts and letters, and scientific research?
Would this be an effective use of resources? From the standpoint of economic theory, government expenditures in such areas often provide benefits that are not being produced by the market economy. Take New York subway stations, for example. Cleaning and painting them in a period of severe austerity can easily be neglected. Yet the long-term benefit to businesses from an appealing mass transit system is enormous. (This is an example of an “externality,” which the market economy, left to its own devices, will neglect.)

A vitally important question here is how much we would pay members of this modern day CCC and what kind of labor laws would govern the program. At the end of the post, Shiller writes:

Big new programs to create jobs need not be expensive. Suppose the cost of hiring a single employee were as high as $30,000 a year, several times typical AmeriCorps living allowances. Hiring a million people would cost $30 billion a year. That’s only 4 percent of the entire federal stimulus program, and 0.2 percent of the national debt.

Given that some of this $30,000 would have to be devoted to guaranteeing that real work is being done, we’re potentially taking about a very low wage.

Like Harvard Kennedy School sociologist William Julius Wilson, I’d be comfortable with some kind of public jobs program, provided employees could be dismissed at-will and the compensation offered was below the private sector minimum wage, to induce workers to seek jobs out of the program. The reason is simple: a long period of unemployment can erode the noncognitive skills that one needs to hold a job.

One wonders if organized labor would be comfortable with a sub-minimum wage public jobs program, which would potentially involve workers who are substitutes as well as complements for existing public sector workers.