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Syllabus
with federal law is premised on irrelevant relationships and leads to the wrong question: Pre-emption analysis turns on the policy's actual content and its real effect on federal rights, not on whether § 229 is valid under the Federal Constitution or whether the policy is, as a matter of state law, a proper interpretation of § 229. Second, the argument that a "rational basis" supports the distinction the policy draws between employees represented by unions and those who are not mistakes a validity standard under the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses for what the Supremacy Clause requires: a determination whether the state rule conflicts with the federal law. Pp. 118-121. (c) This Court's decisions according pre-emptive effect to LMRA § 301 foreclose even a colorable argument that a claim under Labor Code § 203 was pre-empted here, since they establish that the section does not broadly pre-empt nonnegotiable employee rights conferred by state law; that it is a claim's legal character, as independent of rights under the collective-bargaining agreement, that decides whether a state cause of action may go forward; and that when liability is governed by independent state law and the meaning of contract terms is not in dispute, the bare fact that a collective-bargaining agreement is consulted for damage computation is no reason to extinguish the state-law claim. See, e. g., Allis-Chalmers Corp. v. Lueck, 471 U. S. 202, and Lingle v. Norge Div. of Magic Chef, Inc., 486 U. S. 399. Here, the primary text for deciding whether Livadas was entitled to a penalty was not the collective-bargaining agreement, but a calendar. The only issue raised by her claim, whether her employer willfully failed to pay her wages promptly upon severance, was a question of state law entirely independent of the agreement. Absent any indication that there was a dispute over the penalty amount, the simple need to refer to bargained-for wage rates in computing the penalty is irrelevant. Pp. 121-125. (d) The Commissioner's attempt before this Court to recast the nonenforcement policy as expressing a "conscious decision" to keep the State's "hands off" the claims of employees protected by collective-bargaining agreements, either because the Commissioner's efforts and resources are more urgently needed by others or because official restraint will actually encourage the collective-bargaining and arbitral processes favored by federal law, is rejected. If the policy were in fact animated by the first of these late-blooming rationales, the Commissioner's emphasis on the need to avoid "interpret[ing]" or "apply[ing]" collective-bargaining agreements would be entirely misplaced. Nor is the second asserted rationale convincing, since enforcement under the policy does not turn on the bargain struck by the contracting parties or on whether the contractual wage rate is even arbitrable, but simply on the fact that the parties have consented to arbitration. The suggestion that the policy is meant to stimulate freewheeling bargaining over
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