326
Opinion of the Court
wage law's reach, respondents' "reference to" argument might be more persuasive. The CAC has, however, promulgated regulations making clear that the class of apprenticeship program sponsors who may provide approved apprentices is broader. See 8 Cal. Code Regs. § 230.1(a) (1992) ("Registered apprentices can only be obtained from the Apprenticeship Committee of the craft or trade in the area of the site of the public work" (emphasis added)); id., § 228(c) (defining an apprenticeship committee as "an apprenticeship program sponsor"); Cal. Lab. Code Ann. § 3075 (West 1989) (stating that an "apprenticeship program sponsor may be a joint apprenticeship committee, unilateral management or labor apprenticeship committee, or an individual employer"). An apprenticeship program, it would seem, can be maintained by a single employer, and its costs can be defrayed out of that employer's general assets.
To comport with § 302(c)(6) of the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947, 61 Stat. 157, as amended, 29 U. S. C. § 186(c)(6), the expenses of any joint apprenticeship committee must be defrayed out of moneys placed into a separate fund. The existence of that fund triggers ERISA coverage over programs like that of the Electronic and Communications Systems JATC. See ERISA Advisory Op. No. 94-14A (Apr. 20, 1994). But an employee benefit program not funded through a separate fund is not an ERISA plan. In Massachusetts v. Morash, 490 U. S. 107 (1989), we recognized a distinction between vacation benefits paid out of an accumulated fund and those paid out of an employer's general assets. A fund established to pay vacation benefits, we held, constituted an employee welfare benefit plan; the policy at issue in Morash, whereby vacation benefits were paid out of general assets, did not. The distinction, we concluded, was compelled by ERISA's object and policy:
"In enacting ERISA, Congress' primary concern was with the mismanagement of funds accumulated to finance employee benefits and the failure to pay employ-
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