Pucka, I assume you're joking!
SK is one of the root problems as it's not possible to come to an agreement when he's in the room. I understand he was annoyed when RH walked the last offer into the AOA on the eve of our focus night a few weeks ago and of course he would appear to be angry on the surface.
SK's job is to negotiate for the company to get the best deal he can. He will never sit in a room with our NC and come to an agreement as by his definition, if we agree then there must be room for him to do better. That's why the rostering talks went very quickly to mediation. In this instance he knew that we wouldn't find any common ground so just wanted it over as quickly as possible to get to the next stage.
Pay was different. We want that resolved more quickly so he can just sit there giving unacceptable offers, not budging position and just wait it out until we've gone through the whole GFBA steps followed by our voting process knowing he's on a win-win at the end because either:
a. He'll have managed to get a sub standard pay deal done or
b. The company will go behind his back and do a fair deal while he's not in the room. In this case, he'll just sit back and say they'd have done better had they listened to him.
Either way he's done a great job!
It's not possible to come to a fair agreement while SK is in the room so we can expect a last minute out of the room deal every time.
I think AT would prefer to be more grown up and negotiate like a first world company which may be why there's a bit of an internal battle going on at the moment.