PARIS — Getting a fresh baguette on May 1 in France could be about to get a whole lot easier.
A new law allowing vendors to remain open on Labor Day took a major step closer to passage Friday, sparking the ire of the country’s left-wing parties and powerful trade unions who say the measure undermines workers’ rights.
The law would allow businesses such as bakeries, flower shops and butchers to operate without constraints on the holiday.
France’s current legislation only allows businesses deemed essential, including restaurants, to remain fully open. The owners of nonessential shops can operate on the holiday but only without employees — a rule that several bakeries reportedly breached last year.
The controversial measure proposed by conservative party Les Républicains was approved last year in the Senate. President Emmanuel Macron’s party, Renaissance, recently put it on the agenda of the National Assembly, the more powerful lower house of parliament, in a bid to adopt it before May 1 this year.
Gabriel Attal, the former prime minister who now leads Macron’s party, has emerged as one of the bill’s most vocal supporters. He launched a baguette-branded online petition and posted a video of him buying bread and flowers in which he complains that “in France, on May 1, a McDonald’s can be open, but an artisanal bakery cannot.”
To speed up the legislative process, a lawmaker from Macron’s party put forward a motion to nominally reject the bill, but in practice it significantly curtails normal parliamentary debate on the measure and sends it straight to a joint committee of lawmakers from both the National Assembly and the Senate tasked with hammering out a compromise text.
Renaissance, Les Républicains and the far-right National Rally all voted in favor of the motion, while left-wing parties voted against it, denouncing the move as a parliamentary coup during the heated limited debate on Friday.
“They don’t defend artisan bakers of our villages, they defend chains, shareholders, dividends,” Socialist parliamentary leader Boris Vallaud said.
