In Lingle v. Norge Division of Magic Chef, Inc. (1988) 486 U.S. 399, a worker who filed a workers' compensation claim was terminated because the employer felt the claim was false. The worker's union filed a grievance which was sent to arbitration pursuant to the collective bargaining agreement. An arbitrator ruled in the worker's favor and ordered her reinstated. She then filed a wrongful discharge suit which was removed to federal court. The employer filed a motion to dismiss on preemption grounds. The United States Supreme Court held that although the dispute involved a factual inquiry into the conduct and motivation of the employer, it did not require the court to interpret the collective bargaining agreement and held that there was no preemption. ( Id. at pp. 409-410 108 S. Ct. at pp. 1883-1884.) In Lingle v. Norge Division of Magic Chef, Inc. (1988) was a retaliatory termination case (an Illinois union employee was discharged for filing a worker's compensation claim), the Supreme Court explained that an employee's right to avoid an arbitration provision depends upon the language in the collective bargaining agreement and the application of the particular state law. ( Id. at pp. 405-406.) Since Illinois courts had recognized the tort of retaliatory discharge for filing a worker's compensation claim, and had held the right applied to employees covered by union contracts, the purely factual questions to be determined in a union worker's retaliatory termination case would "not turn on the meaning of any provision of a collective-bargaining agreement." ( Id. at p. 407.) For that reason, the state law remedy (a civil lawsuit) was "independent" of the collective bargaining agreement. (Ibid.) But Lingle emphasizes that, absent such independence, "today's decision should make clear that interpretation of collective-bargaining agreements remains firmly in the arbitral realm; judges can determine questions of state law involving labor-management relations only if such questions do not require construing collective-bargaining agreements. Moreover, there is nothing novel about recognizing that substantive rights in the labor relations context can exist without interpreting collective-bargaining agreements. 'This Court has, on numerous occasions, declined to hold that individual employees are, because of the availability of arbitration, barred from bringing claims under federal statutes. Although the analysis of the question under each statute is quite distinct, the theory running through these cases is that notwithstanding the strong policies encouraging arbitration, "different considerations apply where the employee's claim is based on rights arising out of a statute designed to provide minimum substantive guarantees to individual workers."' ( Lingle v. Norge Division of Magic Chef, Inc., supra, 486 U.S. at pp. 411-412)