Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all such activities except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 158(a)(3) of this title.
The NLRA is concerned primarily with establishing an equitable process for determining terms and conditions of employment, and not with particular substantive terms of the bargain that is struck when the parties are negotiating from relatively equal positions.... The evil Congress was addressing thus was entirely unrelated to local or federal regulation establishing minimum terms of employment.... No incompatibility exists, therefore, between federal rules designed to restore the equality of bargaining power, and state or federal legislation that imposes minimal substantive requirements on contract terms negotiated between parties to labor agreements, at least so long as the purpose of the state legislation is not incompatible with the[ ] general goals of the NLRA.
It is true that the Maine statute gives employees something for which they otherwise might have to bargain. That is true, however, with regard to any state law that substantively regulates employment conditions. Both employers and employees come to the bargaining table with rights under state law that form a “backdrop” for their negotiations.
While the Commissioner and her amici call our attention to a number of state and federal laws that draw distinctions between union and nonunion represented employees, virtually all share the important second feature observed in [Fort Halifax], that union-represented employees have the full protection of the minimum standard, absent any agreement for something different. These “opt out” statutes are thus manifestly different in their operation (and their effect on federal rights) from the Commissioner's rule that an employee forfeits his state-law rights the moment a collective-bargaining agreement with an arbitration clause is entered into. Hence, our holding that the Commissioner's unusual policy is irreconcilable with the structure and purposes of the Act should cast no shadow on the validity of these familiar and narrowly drawn opt-out provisions.
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