Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/260

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WOODDELL v. ELECTRICAL WORKERS Opinion of the Court

If they could not, unacceptable consequences could ensue. There is no doubt that IBEW could sue under § 301 to enforce Local 71’s contract with IBEW and there is no doubt that such a suit would be governed by federal law. If suit by an employee to enforce an interunion contract is not authorized by § 301 and the employee is remitted to state court and to state law, it is plain that the same contract terms might be given different meanings based solely on the identity of the party. This would exert the disruptive influence our cases have spoken of. Respondents contend that construing § 301 as we do signals an unwarranted intrusion on state contract law that Congress could not have intended. It is argued that the federalization of the law of union-member relationships should be limited to the specific provisions found in the LMRDA. But if § 301, fairly construed and absent a later statute such as the LMRDA, covers the suit we now have before us, we should reach that result even with the appearance of a later statute such as the LMRDA unless there is some more persuasive reason derived from the later legislation itself that Congress intended to narrow the reach of § 301. We are unable to discern any satisfactory basis for implying such a partial repeal of that section. Neither are we impressed by respondents’ submission that our construction of § 301 will result in the inundation of the federal courts with trivial suits dealing with intraunion affairs. While we are not persuaded that this argument should affect our interpretation of the language of the statute in any event, we find it unconvincing. As respondents must be aware, the interpretation we adopt today has been the law in a number of Federal Circuits for some time and was adopted 10 years ago by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in a case specifically involving the IBEW Constitution. See Kinney v. International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, 669 F. 2d 1222 (1981). See also, e. g., DeSantiago v. Laborers Int’l Union of North America,