A driver's hours belong in dispatch, not in the payroll file

Two and a half years after the overtime cap for truck drivers took effect in April 2024, most of the conversation in Japanese logistics is still about the shortage it was expected to cause: how many drivers the industry will lack, how much freight will go unmoved, how high rates must rise. Those are fair questions. I want to argue about something narrower that I think matters more for whether the rules achieve their purpose. In most carriers I know, including my own until recently, compliance with drivers' working-hours rules is checked in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

The cap limits a driver's overtime to 960 hours a year. Revised standards also set limits on restraint time, the whole period from the start of a working day to its end including waiting and breaks, and on the rest a driver must have between working days: at least nine hours, with eleven as the standard companies are asked to aim for. Each of those limits is crossed, or not, at a specific moment. It happens when a dispatcher looks at the next day's freight and the available drivers, and writes a name against a run.

Compliance that arrives a month late

In many carriers the system that knows a driver's hours is the attendance and payroll system. It receives the digital tachograph records and time-clock data, totals them, calculates overtime pay and produces a monthly report. If a driver is approaching a limit, the report shows it. The report arrives after the month has closed.

By then nothing can be done except to discover the breach and explain it. The dispatcher who assigned the late return and early start did so three or four weeks earlier, usually under pressure from a customer whose part or pallet could not wait. The data that would have changed that decision existed. It was in the wrong system, at the wrong time, in front of the wrong person.

At Seriyama we found this pattern in our own figures in October 2022. Of 2,150 line-haul drivers, 640 were on course to exceed the coming cap. Our dispatch module, written in 2004, held routes, vehicles and customers. It did not hold hours. Dispatchers kept their own sense of who had worked too much, and the good ones were remarkably accurate. But a depot with three dispatchers and one hundred drivers cannot rely on memory when the limits become annual as well as daily.

The fix we built is not sophisticated. Each night the dispatch system takes the day's tachograph and attendance data and calculates, for every driver, how much restraint time remains in the month and how much overtime remains in the year. When a dispatcher assigns a run, the system adds its expected duration, including the waiting we have learnt to expect at each site, and checks the result against the statutory limits. If the assignment would breach one, it refuses. If it would breach one of our own stricter internal limits, it warns, and a depot manager may proceed with a recorded reason.

What a hard limit costs the sales team

The refusal was the contested part. Our operations executive argued for warnings throughout. He described, accurately, the night when an assembly plant runs short of a part and the only available driver is three hours from his rest limit. A warning lets an experienced manager make a judgement. A refusal takes the judgement away.

I argued the opposite, and I still hold the view. A legal limit is not a judgement call for a depot manager at two in the morning, and a system that allows it to be overridden will, over a year, be overridden in exactly the cases where the pressure is greatest. Those are also the cases where a tired driver is most dangerous. Our President decided for refusals in June 2023.

The cost was real, and it fell on our customers and our sales team as much as on operations. We declined about ¥3.1 billion a year of spot and night business we could not staff within the limits. We built relay points at Kakegawa and Fukuyama, where drivers exchange trailers and return home the same day, which meant new yards and new run patterns. Because drivers lost overtime pay, the company raised line-haul base pay by 6 per cent. Our sales team had to explain to customers that some requests would be refused by a system, not by a person they could persuade.

In the two years since, no line-haul driver has exceeded the annual cap, and average overtime has fallen from 1,020 to 780 hours. On-time arrival at assembly plants has stayed at about 99.6 per cent. I do not claim the system caused all of that. The relay network, the pay rise and a good deal of patient renegotiation with shippers did most of the work. The system made the limits impossible to forget at the moment they could still be respected.

The record a driver is entitled to see

There is a second argument here, and we learnt it the hard way. When a dispatch system holds a forecast of each driver's hours and fatigue, it holds something personal about that driver. In our first release, dispatchers could see a fatigue-risk score for each driver that the drivers could not. The workers' union objected, and the objection was right. A driver who is refused a run deserves to know why, and a driver whose score is wrong deserves to be able to say so.

Drivers now see their own remaining hours, their own score and its inputs on their handsets. Disputes about recorded hours go to a depot manager within a week. The union reviews the scoring rules once a year. None of this weakened the limits. It made drivers more willing to report the waiting and the breaks that the tachograph cannot distinguish, which improved the forecasts.

My argument for other carriers, and for the boards that oversee them, is simple. Ask where in your systems a driver's hours are known at the moment a run is assigned. If the answer is payroll, compliance is being measured, not managed. Ask whether a dispatcher can override a statutory limit, and how often it has happened. And ask whether the drivers can see the record the company keeps about them. The rules were written to protect people who spend their working lives on the road. A carrier that wants to keep them should enforce them where the decisions are made.