Can I force a worker to use multicore when running batch?

Can I tell parpool workers to use multicore rather than singlecore?

In the case that my code runs under a parfor loop single core is obviously preferred. But in some cases I just run one iteration without a parfor loop and I want to let matlabs multicore support improve the speed of the operation.

This works as expected in my own environment where multicore is the default, but when I submit it as a job to a single worker, that worker operates without multicore support, just as if it was running it's share of a parfor loop.

In these cases I'd like the single background worker to enable multicore support, when a parfor isn't in use.

Is there a way to instruct the worker to use multicore operations?