That pleasantness is heavily underwritten by a “vast digital underclass.” Many services that allow you to stay at home work only when others have to be out in the world on your behalf. Worried the grocery store is a petri dish? A contract Instacart grocery shopper will go in your place. That overpriced Purell you panic purchased today from Amazon will show up at your door tomorrow thanks to a small army of humans who showed up at work because they can’t afford not to. Same goes for the instructor leading the on-demand high intensity interval training spin class that saved you from dealing with that guy who won’t stop coughing by the free weights at the gym. He may not be a gig worker, but he can’t lead your class from his home.

This is by no means exclusive to tech. Turns out, a pandemic offers a great way to examine American class inequities. There’s something especially clarifying as it pertains to the gig economy. Silicon Valley has long faced criticism for building products for itself, which is to say, products aimed at solving problems of upper middle class men who spend far too much time working and crave microefficiencies and greater convenience. Much has been reported on how that convenience has created a precarious under-economy of contract workers, dangerous working conditions and same-day delivery environmental concerns.

It’s unsurprising then that Silicon Valley seems well poised to deal with the creeping pandemic. Microsoft, Amazon, and Twitter were among the first major companies to encourage workers to stay home (to be clear, this is a responsible way to approach a viral epidemic). Many have led the way on backing out of work travel to conferences. Recently, BuzzFeed News reported that tech companies are looking at the outbreak as a test case for the “long-gestating but never-arriving moment when working remotely will broadly replace working in person.”

Should Covid-19 usher in a newfound work-from-home movement, it could intensify these inequities. Working from home is a privilege afforded almost exclusively to knowledge workers. More flexible work could take the burden of some families with regard to child care and make part-time careers or balancing work and family life easier. But scaling back on physical workplaces could also mean fewer stable building facilities jobs. Those employees could then be forced into a gig economy with few labor protections that expands to fill the needs of an increasingly homebound work force.

Of course it doesn’t have to happen this way. As the Times’s editorial board wrote this week, “Congress can help by mandating that workers receive paid time off if they fall ill, or if they need to care for an ailing family member.” Companies — especially those in the gig economy — can do the same by offering paid sick leave, by relying less on contractors and by allowing employees to unionize for protections so they aren’t forced ignore advice to stay home.