Opinion ID: 198969
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Connection.

Text: 11 Travelers plainly signaled a significant analytic shift in regard to the connection with portion of the ERISA preemption inquiry, 3 abandoning strict textualism in favor of a more nuanced approach: 12 For the same reasons that infinite relations cannot be the measure of pre-emption, neither can infinite connections. We simply must go beyond the unhelpful text and the frustrating difficulty of defining its key term, and look instead to the objectives of the ERISA statute as a guide to the scope of the state law that Congress understood would survive. 13 Travelers, 514 U.S. at 656; accord Dillingham, 519 U.S. at 324. 14 Cataloguing the objectives of the ERISA statute is a fairly straightforward exercise. When Congress conceived the ERISA scheme, it made manifest its intention to protect... the interests of participants in employee benefit plans and their beneficiaries... by establishing standards of conduct, responsibility, and obligation for fiduciaries of employee benefit plans, and by providing for appropriate remedies. 29 U.S.C. § 1001(b). Achieving this end requires the avoidance of a multiplicity of regulation and, concomitantly, the creation of a climate that permit[s] the nationally uniform administration of employee benefit plans. Travelers, 514 U.S. at 657. Using this template, the Massachusetts bond statute, on its face, in no way inhibits the accomplishment of ERISA's overall goals. 15 It is well accepted, however, even under the new regime, that state laws which furnish alternative enforcement mechanisms threaten the uniformity that Congress labored to achieve and thus are preempted by ERISA. 4 See id.; see also Ingersoll-Rand Co. v. McClendon, 498 U.S. 133, 142-45 (1990). This category comes to mind because the most obvious tie between the Massachusetts bond statute and ERISA plans as a class concerns the former's role as a vehicle of enforcing funding obligations. The question, then, is whether the bond statute impermissibly supplies an alternative enforcement mechanism for ERISA plan benefits (and thereby triggers preemption). See Travelers, 514 U.S. at 658; Parrino, 146 F.3d at 705; see also Turner v. Fallon Community Health Plan, Inc., 127 F.3d 196, 199 (1st Cir. 1997). 16 We answer that question in the negative. ERISA preemption proscribes the type of alternative enforcement mechanism that purposes to provide a remedy for the violation of a right expressly guaranteed and exclusively enforced by the ERISA statute. See Ingersoll-Rand, 498 U.S. at 145. Those state laws which touch upon enforcement but have no real bearing on the intricate web of relationships among the principal players in the ERISA scenario (e.g., the plan, the administrators, the fiduciaries, the beneficiaries, and the employer) are not subject to preemption on this basis. See Woodworker's Supply, Inc. v. Principal Mut. Life Ins. Co., 170 F.3d 985, 990 (10th Cir. 1999). It follows that a state statute which only creates claims against a surety does not constitute an impermissible alternative enforcement mechanism as that term is used in ERISA jurisprudence. See Trustees for Mich. Laborers' Health Care Fund v. Seaboard Sur. Co., 137 F.3d 427, 429 (6th Cir. 1998); Bleiler v. Cristwood Constr., Inc., 72 F.3d 13, 15 (2d Cir. 1995). 17 That ends this aspect of the matter. The Massachusetts bond statute does not constitute a proscribed alternate enforcement mechanism. By the same token, it has no other meaningful nexus with ERISA; it does not, for example, interfere with the administration of covered employee benefit plans, purport to regulate plan benefits, or impose additional reporting requirements. Last - but far from least -it regulates an area of the law traditionally thought to be the states' preserve: enforcing contracts under state law for the citizenry's protection. See Operating Eng'rs Health & Welfare Trust Fund v. JWJ Contracting Co., 135 F.3d 671, 678 (9th Cir. 1998); Romney v. Lin, 105 F.3d 806, 811 (2d Cir. 1997). Consequently, we conclude that the Massachusetts bond statute does not have a sufficient connection with covered employee benefit plans to warrant ERISA preemption. 18