This article investigates the covert language policy and micro-language planning practices of one female Brazilian-American entrepreneur, Magda, within her multilingual cleaning company. Because Magda is plurilingual (Spolsky in Language policy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004), she is able to draw on her metalinguistic awareness and multicompetence in order to facilitate communication between her working-class migrant employees and her Englishspeaking clients as well as engage in what we call ''inter-employee brokering''. Magda's position as the company's primary language broker enhances her authoritative power in both employer-employee and company owner-customer relations. The current study addresses the need to look into language practices and micro language planning within local contexts (Nekvapil and Nekula in Language planning in local contexts. Multilingual Matters, New York, pp [268][269][270][271][272][273][274][275][276][277][278][279][280][281][282][283][284][285][286][287] 2008) as well as blue-collar workplaces (Holmes in Continuum companion to discourse analysis. Continuum, London, pp 185-198, 2011; Lønsmann and Kraft in The Routledge handbook of language in the workplace. Routledge, New York, forthcoming), which in one way reflect macro social structures, class differences and asymmetrical power relations concerning language use, but also emphasize a deviation from these macro-level patterns through the value placed on Portuguese as the lingua franca within the cleaning company.

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IntroductionLanguage functions as a symbolic, interactional, material and ideological resource. On the one hand, it can perpetuate inequality by facilitating modes of domination and subordination between individuals of different status. On the other hand, those with access to linguistic and other semiotic resources may exploit them for their own empowerment. These considerations are relevant to every communicative context; however, they are particularly salient to workplace settings (Moyer 2018). These considerations are further accentuated in care work contexts, which function as prime sites of both privilege and marginalization. Within these sites, extremely asymmetrical power relations stem from unequal access to economic, material, linguistic and social capital (Bourdieu 1991) and, in some cases, also citizenship.A sociolinguistic investigation into the largely under-investigated sites of care work contexts merits attention for a number of reasons, three of which receive mention here. These sites' primary situatedness within private residences that, by definition, function outside of the realms of institutional oversight and control, represents the first of these reasons. Here, the linguistic tools of discursive discrimination can flourish as a direct result of their embeddedness in these hidden domains (Ladegaard 2017). The methodological challenges associated with both attaining access to these sites and collecting data from these often marginalized participantswith their ethnic, racial, socio-economic and linguistic backgrounds that typically differ from those of researchers (Anderson 2001; Lutz 2011)intensifies the invisibility of these domains. In conjunction with the aim of increasing their visibility, a second justification that drives this special issue's inquiry into care work includes the potential to reformulate conceptualizations of market dynamics based on a fuller understanding of the magnitude and influence of this sector. Recent work that addresses language and the workplace is often framed according

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