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Is the Coronavirus Shaping the Future of How We Work?

There is already a sense that in the Golden State it is creating an inflection point of the same significance as World War II.

The coronavirus may create an inflection point in how people live in San Francisco and beyond. Credit...Josh Edelson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Contributing Opinion Writer

Both the irony and the symbolism were evident as members of the California Future of Work Commission gathered in a virtual meeting, hastily rescheduled in the midst of an unfolding crisis.

The pandemic, and the recession all but certain to follow, threaten to pre-empt and overwhelm efforts to shape the future of work, and thus the future of California — how to create good jobs, reduce poverty and redefine relationships and structures to narrow the enormous income inequality that overshadows the state’s wealth and success.

Thus the recent meeting became not only an experiment for doing business in a post-coronavirus world but also a conversation laden with doubts, fears and aspirations about how the future may evolve.

The coronavirus will have a silver lining if it serves as the impetus for constructive upheaval, in the way that the sudden forced reliance on telecommunication is already having an impact.

“We are conducting a natural experiment,” said Peter Schwartz, a futurist and member of the commission. “One we would prefer not to have conducted. But we’re going to learn the hard way, rather quickly and by necessity, everything that can be done remotely. … We’re not going back to zero afterward. What do we learn out of all this in terms of how our society can change?”

World War II, the last international crisis that upended life in California, transformed the state into a military center and ushered in decades of growth that reshaped the Golden State. There is already a sense that in a different way, the coronavirus may create an inflection point of comparable significance. For better or worse, whenever the epidemic subsides, there will be no going back.

If private industries can be shamed into providing sick days for employees, will they take those benefits away when the panic passes? If thousands of homeless people living on the streets can be placed in hotels to protect against disease, as Gov. Gavin Newsom is pledging to do, will they later be returned to tent encampments?

As millions of college students — and their teachers — adjust to remote classes, will the universities continue to battle the idea of online education? If overcrowded jails safely release inmates awaiting trial in order to mitigate the danger of widespread infection, will they go back to locking up those who cannot afford bail?

Will the tens of thousands of “super-commuters” in the Central Valley city of Stockton — more than a quarter of the population — return to their cars for daily multihour drives to the Bay Area?

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.

Amid the urgency were lighter moments, befitting the state where actors have become governors.

Mel Brooks’s son, separated from his father by a glass patio door, made a video that explained how he as a young person might safely recover from the coronavirus, but he could infect and thus wipe out a generation of comedians — Mr. Brooks as well as Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke.

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger released a series of unique public service announcements that became hits on social media: a tutorial on how to wash hands that featured his dog Cherry; a video on how he was sheltering in place with Lulu and Whiskey, his pet miniature pony and donkey; and a short clip of Mr. Schwarzenegger riding his bike past a giant mural of himself in all his peak bodybuilding glory, a reminder to exercise outdoors — alone. (Many people took to Twitter to chastise him for not wearing a helmet.)

In recent years, more people have left California than moved in, forced out by the high cost of living, the housing shortage, the lack of good-paying middle-class jobs. Forecasts have predicted a gap of as much as a million college-educated workers. It is a very different landscape from the California of the 1960s that greeted Mr. Schwartz, the Future of Work commissioner, when he arrived. “Everybody wanted to be here,” he said. “This was where the future was being born.”

Even when smog clouded that future so badly you could not see the skyline, Californians identified the culprit and led the way in imposing emission standards. Last week, as the world sheltered in place and left freeways eerily empty, the air-quality map for Los Angeles was bright green. Perhaps that, too, can be part of the future.

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Miriam Pawel (@miriampawel) is the author of “The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty That Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation” and a contributing opinion writer.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: How Much Is the Coronavirus Shaping the Future?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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