This paper explores the covert language policy and micro-language planning practices of a female Brazilian-American entrepreneur, Magda, within her multilingual cleaning company. As Magda is plurilingual (Spolsky in Language policy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004), she is able to use her metalinguistic awareness and multicompetence in order to ease communication between her working-class migrant employees and her English-speaking clients as well as engage in what is called here “inter-employee brokering”. Magda’s position as the company’s primary language broker increases her authoritative power in both employer-employee and company owner-customer relations. This study handles 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 268–287, 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 regarding language use, but also underscore a deviation from these macro-level patterns via the value placed on Portuguese as the lingua franca within the cleaning company.