Lisbeth Dalgaard Svanholm aims to gather big and small employers

Danish trade unions have created the Danish Trade Union Confederation, FH, in order to gain more influence. Meanwhile the Danish Confederation of Employers, DA, has also made changes at the top. In December 2018 they replaced their leader. The new President is a woman, a grocer and she is focused on gender equality.

DA represents 14 private sector employer’s organisations and speaks for more than 24 000 companies within industry, trade, transport, service and construction. The new DA President, Lisbeth Dalgaard Svanholm, therefore speaks for many and very diverse organisations, and it is her job to secure they get the best possible chance to influence things. 

Her greatest task is perhaps therefore to be found within the organisation itself. DA’s members are very different and there is internal rivalry: there is the giant Confederation of Danish Industry (DI), the Danish Chamber of Commerce and the Danish Construction Association – as well as a range of smaller and very small member organisations. The new President must therefore seek broad compromises that all the members can agree on, predicts the newsletter Mandag Morgen.  

When taking the job, the President herself said her main job would be to secure companies good framework conditions and the necessary labour – including from abroad. 

Before she became DA President, she headed the grocery trade organisation De Samvirkende Købmænd, DSK. At the time, she said she wanted to focus on gender equality, and that she felt the social partners shared a responsibility for getting female middle managers into the top leadership of companies. She also advised women to marry men who feel the family is a joint project, and that the woman should also be able to pursue her career. And she warned that maternity leave must not become something that put breaks on the women's careers. 

She has herself taken over her father’s supermarket in the city of Hørsholm north of Copenhagen, which she now owns and runs. She is 59 and married with two children.