Work has increasingly re-organized and fissured: the breakdown of traditional employment relations has pushed lower-income workers into lower-income firms (Weil, 2014), including through sub-contracting, outsourcing, and franchising. A growing empirical literature links such arrangements to declines in job quality along several dimensions, with studies of domestic outsourcing documenting sizable wage penalties (Dube and Kaplan 2010; Goldschmidt and Schmieder 2017) and generally elevated employment instability (Aeppli 2025). We contribute to the literature on fissuring and job quality by examining the case of franchising, which has gone relatively little examined due to limits of existing data. We take on this question by deploying two sources of novel linked data in the US context. First, we use a national individual-level sample of thousands of hourly workers employed at dozens of fast food firms surveyed between 2019 and 2025 collected by The Shift Project. These data provide both unusually detailed direct worker reports of job quality and the capacity to link responses at the firm level to organizational attributes. We make use of this capacity for linkage by leveraging a second source of novel data, legally required annual Franchise Disclosure Documents (FDDs), which report, by state and year, the number of company-owned and franchised outlets as well as detailed contractual provisions that aim to standardize production. We scraped state-firm-year level counts of franchised and company-owned establishments for major fast-food chains for the years 2019 to 2024. We show that workers in franchised fast-food restaurants make, on average, $1.7\hr less than workers in non-franchised fast-food restaurants, and have, on average, a 40-50 p.p. lower rate of access to paid sick leave and a stable schedule. In an overall job quality index, including dimensions such as wages, quality of hours worked, scheduling, fringe benefits, and work-life balance, franchisee companies have, on average, a score that is 3/4 of a standard deviation lower than that of non-franchise companies. Using the staggered implementation of Paid Sick Leave policies across 11 states, we show that these policies reduced the gap in access to PSL by 26 percentage points. Despite the substantial effect of the law’s introduction in reducing the gap, we also document rampant non-compliance with these laws: over 60% of workers in PSL jurisdictions in franchised establishments have their right to paid sick leave violated.