A six-wheeler backs onto your customer's dock at 10:00. The receiving team thinks the driver unloads. The driver thinks the dock does. Nobody has a pallet truck free. Forty minutes later a carton comes off the tail badly, the receiver writes "1 damaged" on the delivery note, and the driver signs it because they want to leave.
Who pays for that carton? Who pays for the forty minutes? Most shippers cannot answer, because "who loads and who unloads" was never decided. It was assumed, differently, by each party.
This article is about making that decision on purpose. How long a truck should wait and what waiting costs is covered in what a waiting time charge is and how much waiting is reasonable. Here the question is who does the work at each end, and what follows from that.
"Loading" is five jobs, not one
When someone says "the carrier loads", they usually mean one of these, and the other four are left open:
| Job | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Labour | Whose people lift, push and drive the forklift? |
| Equipment | Whose forklift, pallet truck, ramp or tail-lift? |
| Load plan | Who decides what goes where, what stacks on what, and the drop order? |
| Securing | Who straps, braces and blocks the load so it cannot move? |
| Count and sign | Who counts, who inspects the condition, and who signs for what? |
Unloading at the other end has the same five, plus one more: who accepts the goods, and what their signature means.
Each job can sit with a different party. The shipper's forklift can load the truck while the driver secures it. The driver can unload onto the tail while the customer's staff move it inside. That is fine. The problem is only when nobody knows which split applies, because then each job defaults to whoever is standing nearest, and the cost defaults to whoever loses the argument.
Four sets of rules already answer part of it
You are not starting from a blank page. Four separate sets of rules each say something about loading, and they do not always agree.
1. Your sale contract with your customer
If you sell on international trade terms, and plenty of domestic contracts borrow them, the term you picked already decides who loads and unloads. The International Chamber of Commerce spells it out:
- EXW (ex works). The buyer loads, at the buyer's cost and risk. The seller only has to have the goods ready. ICC describes EXW as best suited to domestic trade.
- FCA at the seller's premises. The seller loads the goods onto the buyer's truck, and carries the risk while doing so.
- FCA at another place, such as a terminal. The seller brings the goods there ready to be unloaded from its vehicle, and the buyer unloads.
- DAP. The seller delivers to the destination but does not unload.
- DPU. The seller delivers and does unload.
The trap is that sales agrees the term and transport books the truck, and the two are rarely read side by side. A customer on DAP terms whose dock expects your driver to unload has been given DPU for free.
2. Your contract with the carrier
Under the Civil and Commercial Code, a carrier is liable for goods entrusted to it that are lost, damaged or delayed. Read in Thai, Section 616 lets the carrier escape that liability only if it proves one of three things: force majeure, the nature of the goods themselves, or the fault of the sender or the consignee.
That last defence is where loading comes in. If your crew stacked heavy cartons on light ones, or your forklift pierced a pallet at the door, the carrier has a ready answer to your claim: the damage was your fault, not a failure of the carriage. The same applies at the other end. Damage done by the customer's forklift while unloading is the consignee's fault.
So the party that physically does the loading also holds the risk of doing it badly. Taking the job on means taking the risk. Handing it to the carrier moves the risk too, but only if the handover is clear enough to prove later. How the rest of a damage claim runs, including the other two defences, is in who pays when goods arrive damaged.
Two more sections decide how clear it has to be:
- Section 625. A clause printed on the carrier's receipt or consignment note that excludes or limits the carrier's liability is void unless the sender expressly agreed to it. A stamp saying the carrier is not responsible for a count it did not witness is the kind of clause the section is about. If you want the split to hold, it belongs in a document both sides signed, not on the back of a delivery note.
- Section 623. The carrier's liability ends once the consignee takes the goods without objection and the freight is paid. Hidden damage survives only if it is notified within eight days. So the person who signs at unloading, and whether they write anything next to their signature, decides whether a claim exists at all.
3. The road
Road traffic law does not care who loaded the truck. Section 20 of the Road Traffic Act, read in Thai, puts the duty on the driver: whoever drives a vehicle carrying goods must provide the means to stop the load falling, leaking or blowing off.
That has a practical consequence for any shipper who loads with its own crew. The driver carries the legal duty for a load they did not stack. A reasonable driver will want to look at it, strap it and sometimes refuse it. Build that into the loading time rather than treating it as obstruction. A load that is legal when the doors close is cheaper than one that moves on the first bend.
4. Labour law
Whoever employs the person lifting has a legal limit on how heavy the lift can be. Section 37 of the Labour Protection Act bans employers from having an employee lift, carry, drag or push loads over the rates in a ministerial regulation. The Ministry of Labour's safety division sets the ceilings out as 55 kg for a man and 25 kg for a woman per person, with lower limits for workers aged 15 to 17.
This is the carrier's obligation towards its own driver, and your obligation towards your own dock staff. It matters because "the driver will unload" is often a plan to have one person hand-carry a load. A 12-tonne load of 50 kg sacks is 240 lifts, each just under the ceiling for a man and double the ceiling for a woman. If the plan is legal only with one particular driver, it is not a plan.
What "unclear" actually costs
When the split is not written down, the costs show up in places that do not look like loading.
Time on a vehicle day. Every minute the driver spends hand-unloading, or waiting for someone to decide who will, comes out of a working day capped by law. That minute is paid for whether or not it appears on an invoice.
A route that does not fit. A route planner assumes a time per stop. If one customer expects the driver to hand-unload and the plan assumed a forklift, the route fails at that stop and every stop after it. "No forklift to unload" and "the driver must check and sign for every item" are standard examples of constraints a scheduler has to know before planning. They belong in the delivery point record described in master data before software, not in a driver's memory.
Claims you cannot win. If nobody recorded who stacked the load, the fault-of-the-sender defence and your claim cancel out into an argument. If the receiver signed without writing anything, Section 623 may have ended the claim before anyone looked inside the cartons.
Quiet price increases. A carrier that learns your customers expect free unloading will price it into the next rate review, spread across every lane, including the ones where it never happens.
A Thai case: deciding who unloads unlocked the night
The clearest evidence that this is worth deciding comes from a Japanese commercial vehicle distributor in Thailand, studied by researchers at Chulalongkorn University.
The company delivered spare parts to service centres around Bangkok in daytime traffic. Trucks left 40% full on average, and parts often arrived the afternoon after they were ordered, so vehicles sat in workshops waiting for them. The obvious fix was to deliver at night, when the roads are clear. The obstacle was not the road. It was that nobody would be there to unload and sign.
So the company rewrote who does what at the receiving end:
- A lockable dropbox at each service centre, which only the driver and the store staff can open
- The driver unloads into the box and checks the goods
- The driver signs the transport sheet and leaves a copy in the box
- Store staff open the box in the morning, recheck the goods and countersign
- The driver films the delivery on a phone from arrival to the end of unloading, as evidence against any later complaint about damage
In the pilot, every service centre on the trial routes had its parts before opening at 08:00. Simulated across all of Bangkok, the night routes averaged about 68% full instead of 40%, eleven routes became five, and the cost per cubic metre fell from 647 to 487 baht, about 25%. The authors put the overall saving in transport cost at about 35%.
The service centres also named the downsides: theft, rainy season thunderstorms, and boxes that wear out. Those are real. But note what made the saving possible. Not a new truck or a routing tool. It was writing down, in detail, who unloads, who checks, who signs, when the second check happens, and what evidence exists if they disagree.
What to do: one page per site
1. List every site that loads or receives your goods. Your own dock, supplier docks for inbound, customer docks and any cross-dock in between.
2. For each, fill in the five jobs at each end. Labour, equipment, load plan, securing, count and sign. One name per cell: shipper, carrier or consignee. A cell with two names is a cell with no owner.
3. Check it against your sale terms. If you sell DAP and the sheet says the driver unloads, you are giving away DPU. Either charge for it or change the sheet.
4. Write down the heaviest single item anyone will handle by hand. Anything over 25 kg needs a named person who may legally carry it, or equipment. Anything over 55 kg needs equipment, full stop.
5. Define what each signature means. "Received 20 pallets, shrink-wrap intact" is a count and an outer condition. It is not an inspection of what is inside. Say so on the form, and give the receiver a place to write remarks that the driver must not refuse.
6. Let the driver see the load before the doors close. Leave time to strap it, and a photo of the closed load from the rear doors. If the driver may not see it, for example because it is sealed, say so in the carrier contract, and accept that damage caused by how the load was stacked will then be hard to put on the carrier.
7. Put the split in the signed agreement with the carrier, not on the delivery note. Include how much time on site the rate assumes for loading and unloading.
8. Price the exceptions. Hand-unloading, tail-lift sites and sites with no forklift are all real work. A named charge for each is cheaper than a carrier spreading an unknown cost across every lane.
The one line worth keeping
Whoever does the loading carries the risk of doing it badly. Decide who that is at every site, write it where both sides signed, and make sure the signature at the other end says what it means.