The coronavirus has also exposed economic fault lines that were still too easy to ignore in peacetime. The 1 percent wanted the homeless to disappear and the poor to stop stealing packages from porches and breaking into cars. San Franciscans placed boulders on the sidewalk to discourage the homeless from sleeping there.

Now the risks have become exponentially greater, and the connections more obvious. Infected food workers and Uber drivers who lack sick days can spread the disease to even the most well-off. Will the virus force an overdue reckoning with structural inequities built into a society that depends on a service class that can barely get by, even in good times?

Some see reason for hope. Saru Jayaraman, who has organized restaurant and other low-wage workers, pointed to the recent decision by the Darden Corporation, owner of Olive Garden, to reverse its longstanding position and give workers paid sick leave.

“All along they had said, ‘It’s not possible, it’s not possible, it won’t work.’ And suddenly, it’s possible,” said Ms. Jayaraman, also a Future of Work commissioner, who runs the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. “I just think a moment like this is an opportunity to do things that have needed to move for a very, very long time.”

That is a familiar story line in the history of labor relations in California. On the wall behind Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, as she helped lead the commission meeting were photographs of Cesar Chavez.

When he began organizing in the fields, growers insisted that workers weed with a short-handle hoe, an 18-inch tool known as el cortito that required crippling, stooped labor. For years, the growers contended there was no other way to effectively weed — until Mr. Chavez successfully led the fight to ban el cortito, when it turned out that long-handle hoes worked just fine.

Today the speed, severity and breadth of change have been striking. Within the past week, six million children across California were sent home from school, with no return date. The state hastened to help devise plans to feed the 60 percent of public-school students who depend on free meals at school. Three public college systems that educate almost three million students shut down and went online. The California Legislature unanimously granted the governor authority to spend $1 billion on emergency measures, and then it took the extraordinary step of adjourning for almost a month — the first emergency shut down since the great floods of 1862. “Shelter in place,” a phrase used until now to describe last-resort behavior in disasters like wildfires, has become the new norm to cope with a catastrophe whose scope outpaces fast-moving fires.