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Opinion of the Court
486 U. S., at 407. The state-law retaliatory discharge claim turned on just this sort of purely factual question: whether the employee was discharged or threatened with discharge, and, if so, whether the employer's motive in discharging her was to deter or interfere with her exercise of rights under Illinois worker's compensation law.
While recognizing that "the state-law analysis might well involve attention to the same factual considerations as the contractual determination of whether Lingle was fired for just cause," id., at 408, the Court disagreed that
"such parallelism render[ed] the state-law analysis dependent upon the contractual analysis. For while there may be instances in which the National Labor Relations Act pre-empts state law on the basis of the subject matter of the law in question, § 301 pre-emption merely ensures that federal law will be the basis for interpreting collective-bargaining agreements, and says nothing about the substantive rights a State may provide to workers when adjudication of those rights does not depend upon the interpretation of such agreements. In other words, even if dispute resolution pursuant to a collective-bargaining agreement, on the one hand, and state law, on the other, would require addressing precisely the same set of facts, as long as the state-law claim can be resolved without interpreting the agreement itself, the claim is 'independent' of the agreement for § 301 pre-emption purposes." Id., at 408-410.
The Court's ruling in Lingle that the LMRA pre-empts state law only if a state-law claim is dependent on the interpretation of a CBA is fully consistent with the holding in Buell, 480 U. S., at 564-565, that the RLA does not pre-empt "substantive protection . . . independent of the [CBA]," with the holding in Terminal Railroad, 318 U. S., at 7, that the RLA does not pre-empt basic "protection . . . laid down by state authority," with the conclusion in Andrews, 406 U. S.,
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