Japan requires shippers moving over 90 thousand tons a year to appoint a logistics director and plan how to cut drivers' waiting time; Mexico's NOM-087 does not name the shipper
Translated from the Spanish original.
In April 2026 the second phase of Japan's amended logistics efficiency law took effect: every shipper that moved more than 90,000 tons in the previous fiscal year is designated a specified shipper, must appoint a logistics director—failure to do so is punishable by a fine—and must submit a medium- and long-term plan, updated every year, to make better use of each truck's load and reduce drivers' waiting and handling times. Reducing waiting is a best-efforts duty that becomes an order only if the government deems the measures insufficient. The first plan was due on October 31, 2026, and starting in July 2027 shippers must periodically report measured waiting times. In Mexico, NOM-087-SCT-2-2017 (an official Mexican standard), in force, regulates driving times and breaks: it counts loading and unloading as auxiliary activities of the driver and binds only the driver and the permit holder—which may be a shipper with its own fleet—not whoever hires a third party to haul its freight; the words "user" ("usuario"), "sender" ("remitente") and "waiting" ("espera") do not appear in its text. The draft that would replace it, published in October 2024, does not mention the shipper either and has not been published as a final standard.
Strategic interpretation
Systemic: Waiting at the loading dock is a cost one party decides and another pays: the shipper sets the appointment and the driver burns hours waiting. Japan attacked that asymmetry by making whoever generates the cargo responsible, with a named executive and a measured plan. The Mexican standard leaves it on the driver's side: waiting does not appear as such—at most it fits in the logbook's "on duty, not driving" hours—and loading and unloading count as driver activity. The poles: freight volume growing with nearshoring, and driver hours running out in the yard of whoever hires them. The large shipper wins, passing on its dock's inefficiency; the owner-operator trucker loses, absorbing it without being able to charge for it. Consequence: It falls to logistics managers at retail chains, bottlers and auto plants in the Bajío (central Mexico)—among them Japanese ones, whose parent companies are already starting to measure waiting in Japan and may ask their Mexican carriers for the same indicator—; to the Dirección General de Autotransporte Federal (federal trucking directorate) and the standards committee with the NOM-087 replacement pending; and to CANACAR (trucking chamber) and small permit holders. What follows: the first place waiting gets measured in Mexico will probably be a Japanese supply chain, not a standard. In 3 to 10 years, shipper-paid detention may go from contract clause to regulatory obligation, and with it dock design changes. Worldview: That a driver's time is a matter between the driver and the employer, not a cost produced by whoever makes the driver wait. What to watch: Whether the final NOM-087 mentions the service user or waiting; whether detention clauses appear in freight contracts of Japanese plants in Guanajuato and Aguascalientes; whether the STPS (Labor Ministry) or a labor court counts dock waiting as working time; and in Japan, the first public list of outstanding shippers.
Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), Chugoku Regional Transport Bureau: question-and-answer material on the amended logistics efficiency law, procedure flow from the Hokuriku Regional Bureau dated April 9, 2026, and the MLIT's official plan form (form 3), which illustrates it over five years; opened by the cross-pollination sweep (90,000-ton threshold, timeline and measurement of waiting). NOM-087-SCT-2-2017, DOF (Mexico's federal gazette) June 28, 2018, full text in SIDOF (the DOF's online information system), and PROY-NOM-087-SICT-2-2024, DOF October 17, 2024; term count done on the full text. On the Japanese side, the text of the law was not opened, only the official material explaining it.
Chapter signal radar
Published on November 3, 2026