Gowri Krishna ’06, who joined the Fordham Law faculty this year as a clinical professor of law, is an educator and advocate with nearly 20 years of experience working on issues related to economic, racial, and social justice. Krishna earned her law degree from Fordham in 2006 and has returned to the Law School after leading several other legal clinics at the University of Michigan, Roger Williams University, and New York Law School, and establishing a first-of-its-kind co-op franchise program in New York City to help vulnerable workers establish new businesses.
At Fordham Law, Krishna directs the Community Economic Development Clinic, which focuses on providing free legal services to community-based organizations, nonprofits and worker-owned businesses. In this Q&A, Krishna discusses the franchise model for worker co-ops and what it means for new immigrants and workers’ rights.
What legal subject are you currently working on?
I’m currently writing an article about a new way of expanding worker cooperative development using a franchise model, which can be especially useful for immigrant populations. Worker co-ops, which are businesses owned and governed by the workers of the business themselves, take a long time to develop. The Center for Family Life, a nonprofit in Sunset Park Brooklyn, came up with the idea of using a franchise model for worker cooperatives as a way to develop cooperatives more quickly. My clinic at New York Law School, the Nonprofit and Small Business Clinic, helped provide legal support to the model, the first of its kind in the country.
The idea here is, instead of one person buying a franchise and controlling its various franchisee businesses, you set it up so that the franchisor is a nonprofit organization and the franchisees are all worker-owned businesses. You could even structure it so that the franchisor is a business owned by each of the franchisee businesses (a cooperative of cooperatives). The franchisor entity owns all of the intellectual property (name brand, etc.) and contracts it out to the franchisees to use. When you have this type of structure, the goal is to develop worker-owned businesses where workers have a say in the operations and management of the business. The incentive to control and extract as much as possible from the franchisees is gone when the franchisor is a nonprofit or a cooperative owned by the franchisees. The purpose of the franchisor is to make it easier for a new worker-owned business to join and have a built-in clientele and to help lower administrative costs by sharing those costs collectively.
Brightly, a residential and commercial cleaning business, is the franchise co-op system we worked on. The first one was set up in Staten Island, and it has expanded to Red Hook, East Harlem, Washington Heights, Tribeca, and Philadelphia.
In addition to the article I’m working on that looks at the larger legal questions surrounding this model, we also put together a guide for people interested in franchising or licensing a worker co-op, and it goes through what licensing is, what franchising is, how much it costs, etc.
Why is this scholarship important?
The guide is meant to be something that’s very practical and will help others recreate this model. On the other hand, the article explores what these systems are and how they can complement each other, from a legal perspective. This model could be used by other lawyers and practitioners and built upon in different ways to think through the novel concepts and issues that we’re raising.
This is an important avenue of scholarship because these models can really help people and raise livelihoods and economic stability for marginalized communities, such as immigrant populations with tenuous work status.
One of the underlying legal issues here has to do with undocumented immigrants. Immigration law says that if you’re an employee you have to show that you have work authorization. And if you don’t, then your employer can be on the hook for hiring you. But there’s no law that says you can’t own your own business if you don’t have work authorization. So that’s where this worker co-op model really took off, as a way for immigrants to be able to work and provide for their families, provide services, and also not get taken advantage of.
What have you learned about this topic or issue that people may not realize?
Franchises have a bad reputation for not paying their workers well and having a big power imbalance between the franchisee and franchisor. Worker co-ops—with a democratic governance structure of one worker-one vote—have a lot of great things going for them, but people don’t really know much about them. When you put the franchise with the worker co-op model, they can solve the problems that each has.
This is an interesting model that you wouldn’t necessarily think of when you think of workers’ rights or a way to bring more justice into the workplace but it actually can be very effective. It’s a matter of creative thinking and creative lawyering to make that happen.
Will you be presenting this scholarship in an article, book, or talk?
I plan to publish this in a traditional law review journal format. But I’ve also presented this topic at the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy symposium this past spring. We’ve been taking this new model on the road, so now I just need to put it to paper and have it published.
How does your scholarship in this area relate to your teaching?
For almost 20 years now, I’ve been working with a number of different community groups and many of the articles that I’ve published have to do with worker co-ops, worker culture, and immigrants. So, my teaching and scholarship come directly out of the work that we’re doing in the clinical program.
