Cite as: 512 U. S. 107 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
law) were animated simply by the frugal desire to conserve the State's money for the protection of employees not covered by collective-bargaining agreements, the Commissioner's emphasis, in the letter to Livadas and in this litigation, on the need to "interpret" or "apply" terms of a collective-bargaining agreement would be entirely misplaced.
Nor is the nonenforcement policy convincingly defended as giving parties to a collective-bargaining agreement the "benefit of their bargain," see Brief for Respondent 18, n. 13, by assuring them that their promise to arbitrate is kept and not circumvented. Under the Commissioner's policy, enforcement does not turn on what disputes the parties agreed would be resolved by arbitration (the bargain struck), see Gilmer, 500 U. S., at 26, or on whether the contractual wage rate is even subject to (arbitrable) dispute. Rather, enforcement turns exclusively on the fact that the contracting parties consented to any arbitration at all. Even if the Commissioner could permissibly presume that state-law claims are generally intended to be arbitrated, but cf. id., at 35 (employees in prior cases "had not agreed to arbitrate their statutory claims, and the labor arbitrators were not authorized to resolve such claims"),21 her policy goes still further. Even in cases when it could be said with "positive assurance,"
21 In holding that an agreement to arbitrate an Age Discrimination in Employment Act claim is enforceable under the Federal Arbitration Act, Gilmer emphasized its basic consistency with our unanimous decision in Alexander v. Gardner-Denver Co., 415 U. S. 36 (1974), permitting a discharged employee to bring a Title VII claim, notwithstanding his having already grieved the dismissal under a collective-bargaining agreement. Gilmer distinguished Gardner-Denver as relying, inter alia, on: the "distinctly separate nature of . . . contractual and statutory rights" (even when both were "violated as a result of the same factual occurrence"), 415 U. S., at 50; the fact that a labor "arbitrator has authority to resolve only questions of contractual rights," id., at 53-54; and the concern that in collective-bargaining arbitration, "the interests of the individual employee may be subordinated to the collective interests of all employees in the bargaining unit," id., at 58, n. 19.
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