When Julieta Aquino leaves for work in the New York City neighbourhood of East Harlem, she does so on her own terms. She gets to decide when she works and what her pay is as a housecleaner, something she could only dream of in years gone by.
The change has come since she joined Brightly Cleaning - an immigrant-led, worker-owned co-operative in New York City that is trying to transform the gruelling job of cleaner into a path to entrepreneurship.
To do so, it is adapting the franchise business model - that which turned McDonald's into a global behemoth, with thousands of small business owners operating under a shared brand.
In this instance, Co-opportunity, a New York-based non-profit, acts as the corporate overlord, giving members access to the Brightly brand, marketing, training and tools like an online scheduling and payment system, that would be costly to create independently.
In return, it collects 5% of gross sales, which it says goes towards administrative costs.
The set-up makes it easier to start a business, allowing cleaners to become owners without having the tens of thousands of dollars on hand it can take to start a company.
But unlike a typical franchisor, Co-opportunity is governed by its members, with a "one worker, one vote" rule that applies to decision-making.
"What we did was we sort of turned the franchise model on its head. And we decided it should be owned by the workers themselves, not by an individual who would profit alone from them," says Julia Jean-François, the co-executive director at the Center for Family Life, the non-profit that helped launch Brightly in 2018.
"What we've done is decided that the worker-owners can be their own engine of change, they can own the economy in their own way. And so, with the franchise model, they take on that role and responsibility. And we see now the incredible outcome of that."
There are now five Brightly locations, with dozens of worker-owners and more than 1,000 customers driving roughly one million dollars in sales.