Brightly, first U.S. franchised immigrant co-op, expands in New York and Philadelphia

Finding work wasn’t a problem when Natividad Aguilar arrived in the United States 15 years ago, from her little mountainous town in Guerrero, Mexico. 

The problem was getting paid. 

In a story familiar to many recent immigrants in New York, she had to put in more than 40 hours a week as a housecleaner to make ends meet, at low wages and irregular schedules she couldn’t control. In an industry rife with exploitation and gray-market jobs, overtime and benefits were distant dreams. 

“We worked a lot and sometimes weren't paid all the work hours,” Aguilar said through a translator. “There was a lot of salary theft.” 

These days she still works as a housecleaner. But her situation, she said, couldn’t be more different. Aguilar sets her own hours. She chooses which jobs she takes. She’s paid more than twice what she used to get, as much as $25 an hour. And perhaps most important, she has time to spend with her children. 

“I've changed a lot as a person, and as a businesswoman,” she said.

Salvation, for Aguilar, came from a perhaps unlikely place: a business model best known to fans of McDonald’s. She’s now a franchisee. 

Two years ago, alongside nine fellow immigrants, Aguilar launched the Washington Heights franchise of Brightly — an eco-friendly cleaning company structured as both a franchise and a worker-owned cooperative.

“It is entirely unique because it's the first worker-owned franchise in the United States,” said Julia Jean-Francois, co-executive director of Brooklyn-based nonprofit Center for Family Life, which in 2018 structured a pilot Brightly co-op into a franchise model that could expand across the country.

In just four years, Brightly has expanded to include five franchises in New York and soon a sixth in Philadelphia, each one a collaboration of worker-owners who are also immigrants. By the end of last year, it was a million-dollar business, Jean-Francois said. 

For the first time, Aguilar said, she’s reaping nearly all of the profits from her own work. Each franchise is owned separately. But all share the Brightly branding, as well as a web portal that allows them to find customers, accept credit card payments and schedule corporate or residential cleanings. 

Brightly isn’t the first time immigrant-led cooperatives in the U.S. have banded together under a shared brand name, according to Julian McKinley, spokesperson for California-based think tank Democracy at Work Institute, which tracks approximately 600 cooperatives around the country in a biannual census. The Arizmendi Association in California also pulls together a consortium of bakeries and construction co-ops under the same umbrella.

But Brightly’s novel franchise model makes it uniquely well-suited for expansion, McKinley noted in a 2020 report. 

Brightly is part of an overwhelming sea change in how worker cooperatives are formed in this country, McKinley argued. Once best known for well-meaning lefty cafes and customer-staffed grocery stores, co-ops have become a way to empower groups previously locked out of opportunity.

The number of worker cooperatives in the United States grew by 30% in the two years since 2019, according to the Democracy at Work’s 2021 census, as workers were laid off en masse during the pandemic. 

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“Gone are the days when the cooperative model was predominantly used by idealists seeking an escape from capitalism’s ills,” McKinley wrote. “Instead, research shows the majority of worker cooperatives are being started by women, people of color and recent immigrants. These entrepreneurs are using the model to overcome discrimination and gain access to the fruits of an economy they’ve been excluded from.”

Using the franchise model for empowerment

The idea behind Brightly was in some ways a no-brainer, said Center for Family Life’s Jean-Francois.

“I don’t know why anybody didn’t do it before,” she said. “It wasn't like rocket science. But it worked perfectly.”

Since 2006, the New York nonprofit has been helping recent immigrants gain the financial knowledge and tools to successfully found worker cooperatives — often an attractive model for recent immigrants who might not have financial means to found businesses on their own.

But drawing up a custom framework for each cooperative was time-consuming, difficult, legally hairy and subject to endless revisions — all the usual perils of the democratic process. 

So they looked instead at what the rest of the business world was doing, Jean-Francois said. About 10% of new businesses are franchises, they noted. And franchises had long been a way for recent immigrants to become business owners and reach customers through familiar branding. 

But upfront franchising fees that stretch into five or six figures can be an often insurmountable barrier, Jean-Francois said, and franchisees can be vulnerable to exploitative business practices.

A lawsuit filed by immigrant Subway franchisees last year in Nevada alleged systemic predatory practices by regional agents. This year, Israeli burger chain BurgerIm was sued by the U.S. government for allegedly targeting veterans with false promises. 

“So we decided to kind of turn the franchise model on its head,” Jean-Francois said. “What if there was no fee to buy in? But you had to show up with your collaborators — with your fellow owners — and work in committees and chip away at all of the tasks that have to be accomplished in order to have a fully operating business? That idea is what became the Brightly cleaning cooperative.”

A first attempt with nanny co-ops proved intractable. But cleaning services was both scalable and an industry where worker conditions were in need of improvement, said Sylvia Morse, a former director at Center for Family Life. The choice of industry also came from workers themselves, she said.

“The group of women who started that first co-op selected cleaning because that was where they had work experience, and they were excited about being able to improve that industry,” Morse said. “In the communities we're working with, many of the workers have done most of their work in domestic work sectors.” 

Over many months Center for Family Life hashed out a legal template to help structure each franchise — which swelled into a 202-page contract — and attended a national franchising conference to help pick up tips.

“Oh, my gosh, how many samples we ate, how much root beer we drank, how many pretzels consumed,” Jean-Francois said, laughing. “It was just really mind-blowing, but also very clear that (franchising) puts complicated business development issues kind of in a box, and makes them accessible to a lot of immigrant groups.”  

Simultaneously, the nonprofit helped form another immigrant-owned cooperative called Up & Go that could provide a website and billing platform, and allow the new companies to compete against gig platforms like TaskRabbit or Helpling. 

Applicants who want a stake in a Brightly franchise must spend a year of “incubation” attending business classes and meetings. The program’s startup costs were funded with a 2016 grant from the city of New York. But moving forward, Center for Family Life hopes administrative costs will be self-supporting, though franchising fees that amount to 5% of profits.

At the Washington Heights location, Aguilar said the year it took to organize her franchise was a hardship, and so was starting her franchise two months before the pandemic. 

But she said she nonetheless had much more support than if she’d been summarily laid off from a cleaning service or ghosted by homeowners — a plight that afflicted so many undocumented immigrants in 2020 that National Domestic Workers Alliance chair Ai-Jen Poo called it “a full-blown humanitarian crisis, a Depression-level situation for domestic workers.”

In Philadelphia Nicole Marcote witnessed this firsthand over and over, she said, as a program manager at immigrant nonprofit the Welcoming Center. She knew domestic workers who'd been harassed, subjected to wage theft or suddenly found themselves with neither work nor benefits.

This was top of mind, she said, when the immigrant-focused nonprofit signed on with Center for Family Life in April to help start the first Brightly franchise in Philadelphia, moving a training and recruiting office into South Philly’s Bok Building. They hope to be operational by next year.

“Not only do they have the model, it has proven to be successful, sustainable,”  Marcote said. “We do foresee that salaries will increase. But what we're also very interested in is this job stability, something that you can count on."

For New York franchisee Maria Elena Escobar, who arrived 17 years ago from Guatemala, the chance at business ownership helped her escape a crisis of a different sort. 

She learned about Brightly while seeking support as a survivor of domestic violence. Co-owning a business offered her a chance at self-sufficiency, something now within reach..

“Above all else," she said, "it’s empowerment.”

Matthew Korfhage is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network's Atlantic Region How We Live team. Email: mkorfhage@gannettnj.com | Twitter: @matthewkorfhage