By Alan Hardcastle
The Professional Housekeepers Association of New South Wales (PHAN) will close on 1 September 2016. Long serving president Maureen Jolowicz explained that the “interest is not there and the committee are working hard for little return on investment”.
PHAN prided itself on delivering education to its members, not simply organising networking events.
At the Association’s July annual general meeting, the committee stood down and none of the other members were interested in standing. So, a vote was taken to close.
“The housekeepers will still network, we have each other’s contact details and the committee have committed to stay in touch,” noted Maureen. And, suppliers will be encouraged to host events.
Perhaps the trend to contracting out hotel services exacerbated PHAN’s demise?
This writer, as a B2B editor and publisher, has been very supportive of, and very involved with, various industry associations across a myriad of industries during his working career. But unhappily Australian management (public sector and private) does not support, nor encourage its people to support, industry associations.
Perhaps one of Australia’s saddest association losses was a world leading industry organisation, the New South Wales’ Healthcare Cleaning Services Managers Association (HCSMA); its members were those managing the hygiene and cleaning of public hospitals.
In fact they wrote (perhaps three decades ago?) the first hospital cleaning manual and developed the very first (in the world) colour coding system. Bureaucratic negativity saw them give up and HCSMA disbanded. All that knowledge gone!
The HCSMA closed so many years ago now that a google search won’t find any reference.