Cite as: 512 U. S. 107 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
purposes animating § 301 will be frustrated neither by state laws purporting to determine "questions relating to what the parties to a labor agreement agreed, and what legal consequences were intended to flow from breaches of that agreement," Lueck, 471 U. S., at 211, nor by parties' efforts to renege on their arbitration promises by "relabeling" as tort suits actions simply alleging breaches of duties assumed in collective-bargaining agreements, id., at 219; see Republic Steel Corp. v. Maddox, 379 U. S. 650, 652 (1965) ("[F]ederal labor policy requires that individual employees wishing to assert contract grievances must attempt use of the contract grievance procedure agreed upon by employer and union as the mode of redress") (emphasis deleted).
In Lueck and in Lingle v. Norge Div. of Magic Chef, Inc., 486 U. S. 399 (1988), we underscored the point that § 301 cannot be read broadly to pre-empt nonnegotiable rights conferred on individual employees as a matter of state law,17
and we stressed that it is the legal character of a claim, as "independent" of rights under the collective-bargaining agreement, Lueck, supra, at 213 (and not whether a grievance arising from "precisely the same set of facts" could be pursued, Lingle, supra, at 410) that decides whether a state
17 That is so, we explained, both because Congress is understood to have legislated against a backdrop of generally applicable labor standards, see, e. g., Lingle, 486 U. S., at 411-412, and because the scope of the arbitral promise is not itself unlimited, see Steelworkers v. Warrior & Gulf Nav. Co., 363 U. S. 574, 582 (1960) ("[A]rbitration is a matter of contract and a party cannot be required to submit to arbitration any dispute which he has not agreed so to submit"). And while contract-interpretation disputes must be resolved in the bargained-for arbitral realm, see Republic Steel Corp. v. Maddox, 379 U. S. 650 (1965), § 301 does not disable state courts from interpreting the terms of collective-bargaining agreements in resolving non-pre-empted claims, see Charles Dowd Box Co. v. Courtney, 368 U. S. 502 (1962) (state courts have jurisdiction over § 301 suits but must apply federal common law); NLRB v. C & C Plywood Corp., 385 U. S. 421 (1967).
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