Car problems? No childcare? How an app is helping people get to work

When the Bus Doesn’t Come: A Startup Tries to Keep Minimum-Wage Workers on the Clock

Ecorescuezone.com – Fast-food restaurants across the country lose thousands of dollars every month to last-minute callouts — employees who simply cannot make it through the door on shift day. The reasons are rarely dramatic. A transmission fails. A neighbor who was supposed to watch the kids cancels at the last minute. The bus route that used to connect a worker’s apartment to the restaurant has been rerouted. The result is the same: an empty station, a longer line, and overtime paid to whoever fills the gap.

In suburban Washington, D.C., a small company called Escalate has built a mobile app designed to intercept those moments before they become missed shifts. The platform, piloted at seven McDonald’s locations in Prince George’s County, Maryland, hands workers vouchers for rides, grocery gift cards, or Visa gift cards they can use to pay a trusted neighbor for childcare — all requested in real time through their phones.

A First Job, a Real Problem

Ebert Velasquez Ramos, a recent high school graduate working the drive-through at a McDonald’s near the Capital Beltway in Morningside, Maryland, had been on the job roughly a month when the story began. His supervisors praised his friendliness. But the logistics of getting to work each morning kept him anxious.

He owns no car. Public transit from his neighborhood to the restaurant is unreliable at best. On days when a friend or relative could not spare a ride, Velasquez Ramos turned to the Escalate app and requested an Uber voucher, arriving at his station on schedule.

“I don’t know if any other jobs really have that option, so I’m glad this one does,” he says.

For a teenager stepping into the workforce for the first time, that single sentence captures a tension that employers and workers alike feel but rarely name: the gap between wanting to show up and being physically able to do so.

From Nonprofit Bootcamps to a Practical Fix

Escalate was founded by Sienna Daniel and Sean Segal, both longtime operators in the nonprofit sector. For years their organizations ran intensive, bootcamp-style training programs aimed at helping unemployed and underemployed adults acquire job-ready skills. The intent was to open new pathways into employment.

What they kept encountering, however, was not a skills gap. It was a logistics gap. Workers who had completed training and landed interviews still lost positions because a car broke down, a childcare arrangement collapsed, or a string of small emergencies compounded into chronic absenteeism.

“Opportunities might be there, but if they aren’t stabilized and they don’t have what they need to be able to get to where they need to go, there’s a problem,” Daniel says.

Daniel’s own family in Ohio illustrates the scale of the issue. Her father, now 73, and her grandmother, 94, still drive relatives to work, help them relocate after evictions, and coordinate food and childcare on a daily basis.

“My dad, who is 73 years old, and my grandmother, who is 94 years old, still support them every day,” Daniel says. “Driving them to work. Picking them up. When they get evicted, helping them to find housing. Food is a big challenge. Childcare.”

Segal adds that the people his nonprofits served were not reluctant workers. They wanted paychecks, even modest ones, because those dollars kept families afloat.

“It can be viewed as not a quality job and not a living wage, but it’s the job they can get and they have right now. And it’s the way they’re supporting their families, so it’s really important,” he says.

The Pilot: Six Months, Seven Restaurants

Feeling they were pushing a boulder uphill with training alone, Daniel and Segal pivoted. The new question: what if the intervention happened at the moment of crisis, not months before? If an employer could supply exactly what a worker needed to reach the job — a ride, a meal, a sitter — precisely when the need arose, callouts should fall.

In 2025, the state of Maryland awarded Escalate a grant to run a six-month pilot with Hopkins-Navies Ford Management, a McDonald’s franchise operating seven restaurants in Prince George’s County. During the trial period, employees could open the app and request:

An Uber voucher when transportation failed. A grocery gift card when the pantry was empty. A Visa gift card to pay a family member or neighbor to watch their children. Daniel notes that workers overwhelmingly preferred the latter arrangement over a voucher for an unfamiliar backup daycare.

“They want the kids to be with someone they know, and that they’re familiar with,” she says.

What the Employer Sees

Imani Ford, who runs the franchise alongside her mother, Mary Hopkins-Navies, says the impact has been immediate and measurable in daily operations.

“Having that app, and having our employees make it to work, has been crazy beneficial for us,” Ford says.

The franchise has not yet calculated the precise dollar cost of a single missed shift at one of its locations. Industry estimates, however, place the figure at roughly $300 per shift when you factor in lost sales, extended customer wait times, and premium wages paid to cover the vacancy. Multiply that by dozens of restaurants and hundreds of shifts per week, and the absenteeism problem becomes a line-item expense that rivals rent.

Why It Matters Beyond One Franchise

The fast-food sector employs millions of workers, a large share of whom rely on public transit, informal rides, or walking to reach their stations. Transportation poverty — the inability to reliably reach a workplace — is one of the most persistent, least-addressed barriers to consistent employment in low-wage sectors. Escalate’s model reframes the employer’s role: rather than treating a callout as a disciplinary matter, the company treats it as a solvable logistics problem, intervening with a small, targeted payment at the moment of need.

Whether the pilot’s results justify scaling the model to other chains, other counties, or other industries remains to be seen. What is clear from the Morningside drive-through, where a nineteen-year-old is learning to take a sausage-and-egg order while navigating a transit system that was never designed to carry him to work on time, is that the question is no longer whether workers want to show up. It is whether the infrastructure around them will let them.