124
Opinion of the Court
cause of action may go forward.18 Finally, we were clear that when the meaning of contract terms is not the subject of dispute, the bare fact that a collective-bargaining agreement will be consulted in the course of state-law litigation plainly does not require the claim to be extinguished, see Lingle, supra, at 413, n. 12 ("A collective-bargaining agreement may, of course, contain information such as rate of pay . . . that might be helpful in determining the damages to which a worker prevailing in a state-law suit is entitled").
These principles foreclose even a colorable argument that a claim under Labor Code § 203 was pre-empted here. As the District Court aptly observed, the primary text for deciding whether Livadas was entitled to a penalty was not the Food Store Contract, but a calendar. The only issue raised by Livadas's claim, whether Safeway "willfully fail[ed] to pay" her wages promptly upon severance, Cal. Lab. Code
18 We are aware, as an amicus brief makes clear, see Brief for AFL-CIO as Amicus Curiae, that the Courts of Appeals have not been entirely uniform in their understanding and application of the principles set down in Lingle and Lueck. But this case, in which non-pre-emption under § 301 is clear beyond peradventure, see infra this page and 125, is not a fit occasion for us to resolve disagreements that have arisen over the proper scope of our earlier decisions. We do note in this regard that while our cases tend to speak broadly in terms of § 301 "pre-emption," defendants invoke that provision in diverse situations and for different reasons: sometimes their assertion is that a plaintiff's cause of action itself derives from the collective-bargaining agreement (and, by that agreement, belongs before an arbitrator); in other instances, the argument is different, that a plaintiff's claim cannot be "resolved" absent collective-bargaining agreement interpretation, i. e., that a term of the agreement may or does confer a defense on the employer (perhaps because the employee or his union has negotiated away the state-law right), cf. Caterpillar Inc. v. Williams, 482 U. S. 386, 398-399 (1987); and in other cases still, concededly "independent" state-law litigation may nonetheless entail some collective-bargaining agreement application. Holding the plaintiff's cause of action substantively extinguished may not, as amicus AFL-CIO observes, always be the only means of vindicating the arbitrator's primacy as the bargained-for contract interpreter. Cf. Collyer Insulated Wire, Gulf & Western Systems Co., 192 N. L. R. B. 837 (1971).
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