French can 'donate holidays' to health workers under new law

France has passed a bill that will allow employees to “donate” their paid holidays to health workers exhausted after their ten-week battle against Covid-19.

However, the Left-wing opposition has already slammed the move as misguided, even “obscene” because they claim it is the role of the state, not individual citizens, to shell out more for the country’s underpaid medical professionals.

As elsewhere in Europe, France’s doctors and nurses were hailed as heroes during confinement, when millions applauded them from balconies every evening.

“This is a gesture, a modest move to show our deep gratitude,” said Agnès Firmin Le Bodo, MP with Agir Ensemble.

The bill, whose stated aim is to allow “the French to express their solidarity”, turns such donations of days off into “holiday cheques”, which doctors and nurses can then spend on travel, hotels, transport and even restaurants.

French businesses already hand out  such“chèques vacances” every year to four million employees who can spend them on holidays via more than 210,000 tourism groups in France and elsewhere in Europe.

But until now, workers were not allowed to pass on their holidays to someone else except in exceptional circumstances, such as to a colleague with a sick child.

Christophe Blanchet, an MP from President Emmanuel Macron’s LREM party who presented the bill, said: “By transforming donated days into holiday cheques, we want to allow health workers to profit more from time off.”

The law also allows individual citizens or businesses to make financial donations to such workers.

There was little point in giving them extra days off, as most had accrued many of these during lockdown and if they all took more "there wouldn't be enough staff to replace them," said Mr Blanchot. This was about giving them more "joyful moments when they are on holiday," he told Le Parisien.

While in Britain, centenarian captain Tom Moore raised £32m for NHS Charities Together, the French have also made generous contributions to public health during confinement via crowdfunding. They handed over more than €20m to Paris hospitals alone with businesses doubling the figure.

Labour minister Muriel Pénicaud said this extra “act of generosity will at the same time contribute to kick-starting the tourism sector which has been very hard hit”.

“If every one of France’s 25 million employees in the public and private sector gave one day off, some €2bn (£1.78bn) could be spent in France on the tourism and leisure sector," said Mr Blanchet.

However, the far-Left slammed the move as an underhand attack on public health funding, with France Unbowed MP Caroline Fiat saying: “It is not up to citizens to thank (health) workers, but the state.”

Socialist Boris Vallaud also said it made him feel “uneasy” given longstanding demands from hospitals and health workers for higher funding and pay. France’s nurses, for example are among the lowest-paid of all OECD countries. As a result, Communist MP Pierre Dharréville called the bill “rather obscene”.

Mr Macron has promised a radical overhaul of France’s generous but demoralised national health service, whose workers have staged a series of strikes in recent months.

The government has launched three months of talks with health experts to come up with a blueprint for reform.

Mr Blanchet made it clear that the legislation’s aim was not to “take the place of other wide-ranging measures necessary to give more means to hospitals”.

After a National Assembly vote on Tuesday night, the bill must now pass through the Senate.