Firestone

The plaintiffs have filed a Petition for Rehearing and Suggestion for Rehearing En Banc contending that our court’s intervening en banc decision in Cramer v. Consolidated Freightways, Inc., 255 F.3d 683 (9th Cir.2001) (en banc), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 122 S.Ct. 806 , 151 L.Ed.2d 692 (2002), requires us to hold that the plaintiffs have stated a state law claim for overtime pay. In Cramer we clarified our decisions with respect to preemption, an area that has become increasingly confusing in recent years. In Cramer, we overruled our cases that had held state law claims preempted where the state right in question was not the subject of any actual collective bargaining agreement provision, but was “ ‘a properly negotiable subject for purposes of collective bargaining.’ ” Id. at 692-93 (quoting Util. Workers of Am. v. S. Cal. Edison Co., 852 F.2d 1083, 1086 (9th Cir.1988)). We held that those cases applied preemption too broadly.

In Cramer, however, we reaffirmed the principle that a state law claim is preempted if it necessarily requires the court to interpret an existing provision of a collective bargaining agreement (“CBA”) that “can reasonably be said to be relevant to the…