UPDATED
Uber For Welfare (UFW) is a crank welfare scheme promoted by Twitter personality Morgan Warstler. Despite its aspirations to innovation, UFW is a standard subsidized employment scheme coupled with a standard jobs portal website, all coupled with a few gimmicky flourishes. As such, it faces all of the known problems of those existing programs, plus an array of additional problems created by UFW's various quirks and ad-hoc calibrations.
What follows are a list of known problems with schemes like UFW, as well as predictable problems owing to its unique eccentricities. This list will be updated as needed, and thus presumably grow.
UFW PROBLEMS
1. Employers can exploit UFW to subsidize employees that it would otherwise pay in full, and pocket the difference in payroll. It is functionally a corporate welfare program that transfers taxpayer money to businesses.
2. Participating businesses do not have to invest anything into this program, since they can always pass their payroll costs along to consumers. For this reason UFW does not avoid free rider problems - it simply lets business owners be free riders rather than recipients.
3. UFW incentivizes companies to try to replace expensive labor with lots of cheap UFW-subsidized labor, driving down wages and pushing more people into the system.
4. The $3m cap on business participation is powerless to keep big businesses from exploiting the system to cut payroll. They can use all of their usual tactics to get around this cap, EG by dividing and outsourcing labor, or can passively benefit from the lower labor costs that emerge in the production chain.
5. For these reasons, UFW would incentivize the growth of a massive sector of low-income federally subsidized employees.
6. Subsidized employment programs have a poor track record of transitioning workers into non-subsidized jobs.
7. UFW would for these reasons also incentivize the growth of a sector of unproductive SMBs that only exist to facilitate big business access to cheap UFW labor.
8. Market inefficiencies and externalities would prevent even those willing to work from finding employment.
9. UFW allows government intervention against the "criminally lazy" but not against "the scumbag slave labor boss". The government can define "some fair criteria" that triggers worker suspension from the UFW program. There is no analagous mechanism against employers.
10. There is no reason to assume that the eBay rating gimmick would meaningfully regulate the employment market. There are already enough real-world analogues (the job reference system, glassdoor.com, and so on) to demonstrate the ways that labor market competition can create perverse incentives and distort reputation systems.
11. The absence of employer payroll investment; the standardization of labor (jobs are literally described through check boxes); the division of complex, high-wage positions into multiple, simplified UFW-positions for the sake of subsidies; the necessity of populating the reputation system with a high volume of work experiences; and a whole range of other factors all incentivize a UFW with a high rate of turnover, and thus high precarity for workers.
Warstler has written about this post. My response is available here.