Cite as: 523 U. S. 866 (1998)
Syllabus
arbitral remedy before challenging the union's calculation in a federal-court action. Pp. 872-880.
(a) Section 2, Eleventh, of the RLA allows employers and unions to conclude agency-shop agreements. Under such arrangements, non-members must pay their fair share of union expenditures necessarily or reasonably incurred in performing the duties of an exclusive employee representative dealing with the employer on labor-management issues. Ellis v. Railway Clerks, 466 U. S. 435, 448. To avoid constitutional shoals, however, fee objectors cannot be compelled to pay costs unrelated to those representative duties. See, e. g., id., at 448-455. In Hudson, a public-sector case in which limitations on the use of agency fees were prompted directly by the First Amendment, the Court held that unions and employers must provide three procedural protections for nonunion workers who object to the agency-fee calculation: sufficient information to gauge the fee's propriety, 475 U. S., at 306; "a reasonably prompt opportunity to challenge the amount of the fee before an impartial decisionmaker," id., at 310; and the escrowing of any amount of the fee "reasonably in dispute" while the challenge is pending, ibid. Pp. 872-874.
(b) The parties have not challenged the Court of Appeals' determination that Hudson's safeguards transfer fully to employment relations governed by the RLA. Accordingly, the Court turns to the question whether agency-fee objectors must exhaust Hudson's "impartial decisionmaker" procedure before pursuing their claims in federal court. The Court answers that question "no," and rejects ALPA's request to extend the discretionary exhaustion-of-remedies doctrine, see McCarthy v. Madigan, 503 U. S. 140, 144, to agency-fee arbitration. A principal purpose of that doctrine—allowing agencies, not courts, to have primary responsibility for the programs that Congress has charged them to administer, see id., at 145—is not relevant here: ALPA seeks exhaustion of an arbitral remedy established by a private party, not of an administrative remedy established by Congress. As a rule, arbitration is a matter of contract, and a party ordinarily cannot be required to submit to arbitration any dispute which he or she has not agreed so to submit. E. g., Steelworkers v. Warrior & Gulf Nav. Co., 363 U. S. 574, 582. ALPA, it is true, acted to comply with Hudson rather than out of its own unconstrained choice. But the purpose of Hudson's "im-partial decisionmaker" requirement is to advance the swift, fair, and final settlement of objectors' rights, see 475 U. S., at 307, not to compel objectors to pursue arbitration. The Court resists reading Hudson in a manner that might frustrate its very purpose. ALPA's assertion of the efficiency served by requiring objectors to proceed first to arbitration, thereby gaining definition of the scope of the dispute, overstates
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