A small transport operation rarely fails because somebody drew the wrong boxes. It fails at 06:40 on a Tuesday, when a truck is standing at a customer's closed gate and the one person who knows what was agreed is not at a desk yet, because their day starts at eight.
That is the shape of the problem. In a five or fifteen person operation the org chart tells you almost nothing useful. Two other things decide the structure, and neither of them is a title.
The first is the clock. Transport runs longer than a person can legally work, so the desk is a roster problem before it is a job-description problem. The second is Thai law, which names specific roles at specific headcounts, and the first one lands at two employees, not fifty. Most operations meet it years late because they are watching the wrong number.
Size the desk from the window, not the truck count
Start with the operating window: the hours between the first vehicle released and the last one back. Not the office hours. The window.
Three limits set what one person can cover.
- Eight hours is the normal day. The Labour Protection Act caps normal working time at eight hours a day and 48 hours a week. A short day's leftover hours can be moved onto another day, up to nine hours, but the week still cannot pass 48, and the hours over eight on that day are paid at one and a half times. Ministerial Regulation No. 12 sets the same eight-hour normal day specifically for land transport work.
- Thirty-six hours is the overtime ceiling. Consented overtime on working days and hours worked on weekly holidays, added together, must not pass 36 hours a week. Work that genuinely cannot be stopped, and emergency work, sits outside that count, which is the exception, not the plan.
- So 84 hours a week is one person's absolute limit. Forty-eight plus 36. Nothing legal gets you past it.
Now put a real window against that number. A depot whose first truck is released at 05:00 and whose last is back at 19:00 has a 14-hour window. Six days a week, that is 84 hours.
Exactly the ceiling. One person can cover that desk, in the sense that a number on a page can be reached, and only by working every single hour the law allows, in a year that contains no annual leave, none of the thirteen public holidays every employer must give, and not one sick day.
That is the real answer to "when do I need a second person on the desk", and it does not mention trucks:
- Under about 48 hours a week of window (an eight-hour window over six days) one person plus a named stand-in is honest.
- Above that you are buying overtime to hold the operation together, and you have roughly 36 hours a week of it before you are outside the law.
- At 84 hours of window two people is arithmetic, not a preference.
The mistake this catches is a common one. Adding a fifth truck that leaves at the same hour as the other four costs the desk minutes. Moving the first departure from 07:00 to 04:00 costs it a shift. Operations grow the truck count and staff for it, then extend the window for a customer and staff nothing.
And the driver cannot quietly absorb the gap. A driving employee must not start the next working day until ten hours have passed since the previous day's work ended. The truck back at 19:00 is not available before 05:00, and neither is the person in it. We have written before about what the driver's statutory day does to a waiting charge; it does the same thing to a roster.
The nine jobs, and what fires each one
Write the jobs down before the titles. In a small operation one person holds three or four of these, which is fine. What is not fine is a job with no name against it.
| The job | What fires it | When |
|---|---|---|
| Take the order and confirm what was promised | Customer contacts you | Through the day, peaking at the cut-off |
| Plan the work | The cut-off passes | Late afternoon for tomorrow |
| Release the vehicle | Driver arrives | Before dawn |
| Drive | The plan | The window |
| Hold the day | Something goes wrong | Unpredictable, mostly mid-morning |
| Close the job | Vehicle returns | Evening |
| Invoice and chase the money | The job closed | Weekly, monthly |
| Keep the vehicle and the licence legal | The calendar | Monthly, quarterly |
| Safety | The law, and any incident | Continuous |
Two of these are routinely orphaned in small teams. Holding the day is treated as everybody's job, which means it belongs to whoever picks up the phone, usually the planner, whose planning then stops. Keeping the vehicle and the licence legal is calendar work with no customer shouting about it, so it slides until an inspection date has passed.
Give both a name and a stand-in. The stand-in matters more than the name: a job held by one person with no second is not staffed, it is exposed. That is the same failure we described in the article on when a spreadsheet stops running your transport, where a person quietly becomes the system.
Three pairs that should not sit with one person
This is not about distrust. It is about what you can prove after a dispute, and about not putting one person in a position where their own record is the only evidence of their own work.
- Whoever agrees the price should not be the only one who approves the invoice. Otherwise a quoting mistake and a billing mistake look identical from outside, and neither gets found.
- Whoever plans the work should not be the only one who records whether it went right. An on-time percentage produced by the planner is the planner marking their own homework. Have the person who closes the job record the arrival time, from the proof of delivery, not from memory.
- Whoever holds cash on delivery should not be the only one who reconciles it. In a very small team the owner takes the second half of this pair. That is the correct answer, not a workaround.
Everything else can be combined freely. The textbook argument against splitting one flow across separate reporting lines applies here in reverse: the seams you deliberately create should be few, chosen, and each one should exist because it protects a record.
The role Thai law names first, and it lands at two employees
Here is the part almost every small transport operation gets wrong, and it is not obscure. It is a Royal Gazette regulation from 2022 with a criminal penalty behind it.
The Occupational Safety, Health and Environment Act requires an employer to appoint safety officers under a ministerial regulation, and the 2022 regulation sorts businesses into three schedules. The transport industry is Schedule 2, item 37. Warehouse, silo and cold store businesses are item 39, so an operation that does both is caught twice over.
Schedule 2 is the demanding one. The ladder for a transportation company:
| Employees | What becomes compulsory | Deadline |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | Every supervisor-level employee becomes a supervisor-level safety officer, and every manager-level employee a manager-level safety officer | 120 days |
| 20 | At least one technical-level safety officer, working at the establishment | 180 days |
| 50 | At least one higher-technical-level safety officer | 180 days |
| 50 | A safety committee | 30 days |
| 100 | At least one professional-level safety officer | 180 days |
| 200 | A safety unit | 60 days |
Read the top row again. Two employees. Not two hundred, not fifty. And three details make it bite harder than it looks.
- "Supervisor" is a functional test, not a title. The Act defines a supervisor as an employee whose duty is to control, supervise, command or direct employees to work according to the unit's duties. If somebody tells the drivers what to do, that person is a supervisor, whatever the business card says.
- A manager means an employee from the level of a unit manager upwards β and where there is no manager-level employee at all, the regulation makes the employer the manager-level safety officer personally.
- The names have to be registered with the Department of Labour Protection and Welfare within 30 days of appointment, and a departure notified within 30 days. Appointing someone and not registering them leaves the duty unmet.
Once you are above 20 employees the technical, higher-technical and professional officers carry their own upkeep: at least 12 hours a year of further training, a replacement within 90 days if one leaves, and a report to the Director-General twice a year, within 30 days of 30 June and within 30 days of 31 December.
The penalty for failing the safety officer requirement is imprisonment of up to six months, a fine of up to 200,000 baht, or both.
The counting rule that catches transport operations
Under the Act, an employee is not only someone on your payroll. The definition reaches any person permitted to work, or to produce a benefit, for or in the employer's establishment, whatever they are called. The matching definition of employer covers an operator who allows any person to come and work, whether or not the work is part of that operator's own business.
For a transportation company that is decisive. The yard hands, the loaders, the driver introduced by a friend and paid per trip, the second driver riding with your own β if they work in your establishment, they are inside the count that triggers every row of the table above. Counting only the people with employment contracts is how an operation with thirty people on site convinces itself it has twelve and needs nothing.
What else lands at ten, and what lands at fifty
Two more headcounts change the administration job, which is usually the job nobody has been given.
At ten employees, four things start on a fifteen-day clock.
- Work rules in Thai, covering eight required subjects: working days and normal hours and breaks; holidays and the rules for taking them; the rules for overtime and holiday work; the day and place wages are paid; leave and the rules for taking it; discipline and disciplinary penalties; grievances; and termination, severance and special severance. Published within fifteen days of reaching ten, kept at the premises at all times, and displayed openly where the employees work.
- An employee register in Thai, made within fifteen days of each person starting, carrying nine fields including the start date, the position or duty, and the wage rate and other agreed benefits.
- Pay records for wages, overtime, holiday pay and holiday overtime, which the employee signs as evidence. A bank transfer record counts as the document.
- An annual filing on employment and working conditions, submitted each January.
The register and the pay records must be kept for two years, and there is a trap in the work rules: once you have published them, the duty to keep and amend them survives the headcount falling back below ten. Breaching any of these is a fine of up to 20,000 baht.
At fifty employees you owe two committees, not one. People remember the safety one and miss the other.
- The safety committee, within 30 days. At least five members at 50 to 99 employees, seven at 100 to 499, eleven at 500 and above, with equal numbers of supervisor representatives and employee representatives, and the higher-technical or professional safety officer as its secretary. Members are trained within 60 days of appointment and serve two years, and if the headcount later drops below fifty the committee still runs out its term.
- The welfare committee, of at least five employee representatives, who are elected rather than appointed, and whom the employer must meet at least once every three months. If the workplace already has an employee committee under the labour relations law, that body does the welfare committee's job instead.
Three rules that exist only because this is transport
Thai labour law treats transport as a special case in ways that make a workable roster legal. Small operations often either miss them and run a worse roster than they need to, or assume more freedom than they have.
- Holiday work does not need case-by-case consent. Transport is one of the named businesses where the employer may require work on a weekly holiday without asking each time, alongside hotels, hospitals and restaurants. The hours still count towards the 36.
- Rest days can be banked. In transport work, employer and employee may agree in advance to accumulate weekly rest days and take them at any point within four consecutive weeks. This is the provision that makes a long upcountry rotation legal, and it must be agreed in advance, not decided afterwards.
- Overtime is paid at plain time. For land transport work, overtime on a working day and overtime on a holiday are paid at one times the hourly wage rate for the hours worked, unless the employer agrees to pay the ordinary overtime rates. Most people assume the usual multipliers apply and are surprised in one direction or the other. It changes who it makes sense to ask to stay late, and it is a term worth stating explicitly in the work rules rather than leaving to argument.
The driver's own limits sit on top: written consent before any overtime, then two hours a day at most unless force majeure, an accident or a traffic problem makes more necessary; at least one continuous hour of rest after no more than four hours of work, splittable into pieces of at least twenty minutes; and the ten-hour gap before the next working day.
The driver you hired through an agency is probably your employee
One more provision decides who is in your headcount, and it is the one most likely to be a surprise.
Where a business asks somebody to supply people to come and work, and that supplier is not in the licensed employment agency business, and the work those people do is part of the production process or business the business itself is responsible for, the law deems the business their employer β whether or not the supplier controls their work or pays their wages. Those contract-labour employees must also receive fair benefits and welfare, without discrimination, against directly hired employees doing the same work.
For a transport operation the test is easy to apply. If six drivers arrive from a labour supplier and drive your vehicles on your routes to your instructions, driving is your business, not the supplier's. They are your employees for this purpose, they are in the count that triggers every threshold above, and they belong in the register.
What to do this week
- Write down the operating window, first release to last return, and multiply by working days. If it is over 48 hours a week, name the second desk person. If it is near 84, you do not have a choice to make.
- Put one name and one stand-in against each of the nine jobs. Any job with the same name in both columns is not staffed.
- Count everybody who works on your site, not everybody with a contract, and read that number against the safety officer table.
- Check the three pairs. If one person quotes, plans, records and bills, split the recording first. It is the cheapest split and it is the one that makes every other number you look at trustworthy.
The order matters, and it is the same order we set out for the eight decisions in setting up a transport operation: the things that are expensive to reverse go first. A roster can be changed next week. A safety officer appointment that should have been made three years ago cannot be backdated.