Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers & Trainmen v. The Long Island Railroad

SUMMARY ORDER Respondent-Appellant Long Island Railroad Company (“the Railroad”) appeals from the decision of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York (Irizarry, J.), which granted the petition of Petitioner-Appellee the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (“the Union”) to enforce an award of Public Law Board 6846, an adjustment board created pursuant to the Railway Labor Act (“RLA”), 45 U.S.C. § 153. We assume the parties’ familiarity with the facts of the ease, its procedural history, and the scope of the issues on appeal. We previously remanded this case to the District Court so that it could provide further explanation as to its reasoning in selecting pre-judgment interest rates. 1 The District Court has now provided that additional explanation, and we resume our consideration of the case. “The rate of pre-judgment interest is within the broad discretion of the district court.” N.Y. Marine & Gen. Ins. Co. v. Tradeline (L.L.C.), 266 F.3d 112, 131 (2d *199 Cir.2001) (alterations omitted). “In exercising such discretion, the court is to take into consideration (i) the need to fully compensate the wronged party for actual damages suffered, (ii) considerations of fairness and the relative equities of the award, (iii) the remedial purpose of the statute involved, and/or (iv) such other general principles as are deemed relevant by the court.” Jones v. UNUM Life Ins. Co. of Am., 223 F.3d 130, 139 (2d Cir.2000) (internal quotation marks omitted). The Railroad argues that the District Court’s latest order suffers from the same flaw as its previous order, and provides no basis on which we can assess whether it abused its discretion. We disagree. Here, the District Court justified the rates it chose by looking to how the NLRB calculated interest in the analogous context of back pay awards. See New Horizons for the Retarded, Inc., 283 NLRB 1173, 1174 (1987) (requiring that interest on back pay awards should be “computed at the ‘short-term Federal rate’ for the underpayment of taxes” as assessed by the IRS). It also noted that the rates it selected were lower than those awarded by other district courts within the Second Circuit in analogous labor disputes. In other words, the District Court considered (a) the nature of the specific claims at issue, and (b) how analogous claims were treated in other settings. We see no abuse of discretion in this approach. Cf. Jones, 223 F.3d at 140 (vacating a pre-judgment interest rate because the District Court had relied solely on a case that bore “no obvious similarity” to the case at hand). Nor do we find any reason to think that these rates are not “fair and equitable,” as the District Court believed them to be. Because the District Court did not abuse its discretion, we have no occasion to consider the Railroad’s suggestion that a different rate would have been more appropriate, nor need we address the Union’s contention that the Railroad failed to make such arguments before the District Court. For the foregoing reasons, the order of the District Court is AFFIRMED. Footnotes [1] We also identified error in the District Court's selection of a start date for pre-judgment interest rates. The District Court corrected this error on remand, and neither party objects to the newly selected date.