PITTSBURGH — A federal judge has ordered a broadcasting company to pay a union’s legal fees but denied assessing punitive damages.
The original dispute is a lawsuit the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, AFL-CIO filed against Sheridan Broadcasting as part of an effort to recover unpaid wages, unreimbursed expenses and damages related to a breach of contract action involving part-time reporters, audio journalists and producers.
In an opinion issued Oct. 16, Magistrate Judge Maureen Kelly, of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, said although Sheridan admitted both liability and damages in arbitration, it later filed a denial of liability. Ultimately the court found in favor of the union and awarded more than $325,000 in damages.
Sheridan said the request for attorney fees should be limited to the work in prosecuting claims regarding the Pennsylvania Wage Payment and Collection Law, about 73 percent of the overall damages. Kelly said that although state law only mandates attorney fee compensation for WPCL claims, it is appropriate to grant full fees when other claims are sufficiently related to the wage law, as is the case with the union’s action.
The union’s claims “are clearly interrelated because all of them arise from the failure of defendants to pay the union members earned unpaid wages, wage increases and severance, as well as defendants’ withholding union members’ wages for union dues but not remitting them to the union as required,” Kelly wrote. She awarded $49,042 in legal fees and $1,951 in court costs.
However, Kelly denied the union’s request for punitive damages related to its common law conversion claim. She said Sheridan Broadcasting and its owners supplied copious evidence of its difficult financial position, including a bankruptcy filing, to bolster its claim there was no “usurpation of funds nor malicious intent, but rather poor economic circumstances.”
Kelly called the network’s conduct “disconcerting to say the least,” but said the union failed to prove it rose to the level of willful or wanton needed to justify punitive damages.