Cite as: 512 U. S. 107 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
former being less "in need" than the latter. While we hardly suggest here that every distinction between union-represented employees and others is invalid under the NLRA, see infra, at 131-132, the assertion that represented employees are less "in need" precisely because they have exercised federal rights poses special dangers that advantages conferred by federal law will be canceled out and its objectives undermined. Cf. Metropolitan Life, 471 U. S., at 756 ("It would turn the policy that animated the Wagner Act on its head to understand it to have penalized workers who have chosen to join a union by preventing them from benefiting from state labor regulations imposing minimal standards on nonunion employers"). Accordingly, as we observed in Metropolitan Life, the widespread practice in Congress and in state legislatures has assumed the contrary, bestowing basic employment guarantees and protections on individual employees without singling out members of labor unions (or those represented by them) for disability; see id., at 755; 23
accord, Lingle, 486 U. S., at 411-412.
Nor do professions of "neutrality" lay the dangers to rest. The pre-empted action in Golden State I could easily have been redescribed as following a "hands-off" policy, in that the city sought to avoid endorsing either side in the course of a labor dispute, see 475 U. S., at 622 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (city did not seek "to place its weight on one side or the other of the scales of economic warfare"), and the respondent commission in Nash may have understood its policy as expressing neutrality between the parties in a yet-to-be-23 We noted that "Congress [has never] seen fit to exclude unionized workers and employers from laws establishing federal minimum employment standards. We see no reason to believe that for this purpose Congress intended state minimum labor standards to be treated differently . . . . Minimum state labor standards affect union and nonunion employees equally and neither encourage nor discourage the collective-bargaining processes that are the subject of the NLRA." Metropolitan Life, 471 U. S., at 755.
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