(NBBJ) - When California recently overturned eight decades of U.S. agricultural labor policy by becoming the first state in the nation to approve overtime for farmworkers, it may have set the stage for more challenges for the hard-working crews who bring the North Coast’s world-prized winegrapes to wineries where the magic happens, according to those in the business.

Gov. Jerry Brown on Sept. 12 signed the nation’s first law dropping the federal agricultural exemption for paying overtime basically beyond eight hours worked a day or 40 hours a week. The number of hours before earning time-and-a-half pay will start shortening from the current federal ag standard of 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week, beginning in 2019. Ag overtime would kick in for most businesses in 2022 and for operations with 25 or fewer employees in 2025.

Compensation, working and living conditions for agricultural workers has been an incendiary topic in the North Coast and elsewhere in California for decades, heating up recently with language from promoters of the law, Assembly Bill 1066, such as United Farm Workers calling the agricultural exemption racist and unfair.

“That’s an unfair characterization,” said Duff Bevill of Bevill Vineyard Management in Sonoma County. “It may have been an issue in the 1960s, but this is not the 1960s anymore. A lot of them have figured out ways to buy homes in Sonoma County.”