SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom will consult with four ex-governors, recent Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, and dozens of other politicians and business leaders to guide California out of the “pandemic-induced recession” that has gripped the state.

Newsom said Friday that Ann O’Leary, his chief of staff, and Steyer, the billionaire environmentalist who ended his presidential campaign in February, would lead a task force on business and job recovery from the coronavirus crash.

The 80-member council includes California’s four living former governors: Republicans Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democrats Gray Davis and Jerry Brown.

Also on the panel are Disney chairman Bob Iger, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, and Mary Kay Henry, international president of the Service Employees International Union. They will be divided into committees focused on different industries and regions of the state.

Newsom said the task force’s job would be to recommend ways to safely and equitably restart an economy that has nearly ground to a halt during the stay-at-home order he issued last month.

“We want to make this meaningful,” Newsom said during a news conference. “This is not something where, in six months, I’m looking forward to giving you a draft or putting out a long, thick report. We want, in real time, to demonstrate meaningful reports, meaningful changes.”

The coronavirus pandemic has snapped a record 120 consecutive months of net job growth in California and plunged the state into a potential fiscal crisis.

Newsom said Friday that more than 3.1 million Californians have applied for unemployment insurance in the past month. That loss nearly matches the 3.4 million jobs that the state added over the decade since the end of the last recession.

The legislative analyst warned this week that the state could be facing a $35 billion budget shortfall in the next fiscal year alone.

While restarting the economy as fast as possible is a goal of the task force, Newsom said it would be guided first by health and safety considerations. He said the state is still not ready to begin emerging from his stay-at-home order — hospitalizations of coronavirus patients continue to increase, albeit at a slower rate, and 95 people infected with the virus died Thursday, the most so far in a single day.

The recommendations of the task force also will aim to advance California’s environmental and racial equity goals. Its mission, in part, is to “shape a fair, green and prosperous future.”

“We will try to come up with a recovery that is worthy of California’s past,” Steyer said, “and pushes us to the better future that remedies some of the injustices which this COVID-19 pandemic has revealed in our society.”

Angela Glover Blackwell, founder and president of the social justice nonprofit PolicyLink, said the recovery must address the underlying economic inequities that have contributed to the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on communities of color.

African Americans account for about 12% of the COVID-19 deaths in California, though they make up only 6% of the state population. In San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, Latinos are vastly overrepresented among the victims.

“It has been so painful to watch what has happened. It’s been like tons or gallons of alcohol being thrown on the open wounds of inequality and racism in this country,” Glover Blackwell said. “We’re going to have to figure out how to make sure that we don’t go back to what we were before. It was unacceptable then and it will be unacceptable going forward.”

Alexei Koseff is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @akoseff