An official for World Youth Day is “confident” the strike will be resolved in time.
Posted: 07.08.08
SYDNEY, Australia | Sydney’s railroad workers have announced a 24–hour strike for July 17, the day of Pope Benedict XVI’s arrival in Sydney for World Youth Day.
But Jim Hanna, media director for World Youth Day, said July 7 that organizers remained “confident that the parties will resolve their differences through arbitration,” and the papal tour through the streets of Sydney “will continue peacefully and uninterrupted.”
If the strike by the workers’ union over an unresolved pay claim occurs, it could strand up to 750,000 commuters on Sydney’s rail network, including hundreds of thousands of pilgrims traveling from the outer suburbs to the Mass venue.
To avert what could be transport chaos on the busiest day of the July 15–20 World Youth Day festivities, the New South Wales government has taken the issue to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission.
Meanwhile, Hanna said that during the week before the start of World Youth Day organizers had been inundated by “hundreds of walk–in international pilgrims.”
Referring to the pilgrim groups “from the United States, Europe and Latin America who had arrived at our office asking to be registered,” Hanna said the unregistered batch “haven’t shown up in our statistics until now.”
Hanna said many of the new arrivals did not want to be part of the whole week’s program and were asking for registration of the weekend package that includes the pilgrim walk, vigil and closing Mass.
He said despite media reports of a slow turnout for pilgrim registrations organizers were confident of reaching registrations in excess of 220,000 pilgrims, including 123,000 international ones.
The 40 extra flights into Sydney International Airport scheduled in recent days were a measure of the international demand, he said.
“Our contacts at the airlines are reporting that those flights are filling up fast; they’re almost” full, he said.
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