ABSTRACT

Imagine if McDonald’s, one of the most familiar franchises in the country, were owned and democratically governed by workers behind the counter. What would it mean to invert a model built on precarity into one grounded in equity, shared ownership, and community accountability?

What may seem like a radical inversion is part of a growing global movement known as the solidarity economy—an approach that seeks to transform economic life through democratic, community-driven alternatives. Enterprises within this movement offer a compelling counterpoint to investor-driven firms. Yet they face major barriers to expansion, as legal, financial, and operational systems are built for conventional businesses, not for models rooted in equity.

This Article proposes adapting franchising—a tool long used to grow capitalist enterprise—as a mechanism to scale the solidarity economy. While traditional franchises can open pathways to entrepreneurship, especially for immigrants and people of color, they often extract profit and control from the communities they serve. In response, the Article argues for the worker cooperative franchise (“WCF”), a hybrid model that combines the scaling power of franchising with worker ownership and community control. Franchisees are worker-owned cooperatives governed on a one-person, one-vote basis, and the franchisor is either a nonprofit with franchisee board representation or a cooperative owned by the franchisees. By reimagining the legal architecture of franchising, the WCF model offers a means to scale without extraction.

Drawing on the first implementation of this model in the United States, the Article analyzes legal design features that support its success, including governance practices, franchisor entity form, and contractual arrangements around royalties and intellectual property. It also explores tensions the model must navigate, such as balancing local autonomy with system-wide standardization and mitigating dependence on nonprofit intermediaries. Ultimately, the WCF model functions as a prefigurative legal form—one that puts into practice the democratic and equitable values it envisions for the future. While centered on worker cooperatives, the model provides insights for other solidarity economy institutions.