If someone wants to run a business in Scandinavia, because it's a good market or because one for some reason prefers Scandinavian employees, one has to play by the local rules. This includes honoring legal rights to parental leave. Refusing someone a salary increase for using this right would, at least in Norway, be illegal.
Whether it would be illegal or not in Sweden, at least those professional service employers in Sweden who deliberately give the short stick to/for those employees who use their legal allowances to paid parental leave would sooner be left with disproportionately lower productivity workers who happened to not (yet, if ever) take much paid parental leave and can’t be easily fired. And guess how that shows up: padded bills for the clients who end up paying for the “training/re-training/education” and sloppiness of those face-time-in-the-office workers.
It’s a negative hit to productivity in Sweden and in Denmark when people on paid parental leave don’t come back to stick to their employer and instead shop around to find an employer who doesn’t give them the short stick for using their legal allowances to paid parental leave.
Good employee morale matters for productivity. If SAS employee morale was worse than it already has been, perhaps SAS would have been in even hotter water sooner. Now that SAS employee morale is worse than perhaps ever, should it be any surprise that SAS is losing over $130M per day?
Maybe some party will push SAS into a liquidation bankruptcy in the US instead of this ending up as the management-plotted reorganization under Chapter 11 in the US. Actually, there are ways SAS could game this with an involuntary bankruptcy push in the US that may come from some party beside SAS itself, but I doubt SAS management is clued in yet on what that may mean.