PARIS -- France's 35-hour workweek was cherished by workers but despised by many investors and employers. Now, the bold social experiment has been dubbed a failure by France's parliament.

The law gave many people more time for their families, for vacation and for plain relaxation -- but it fueled anxiety about declining competitiveness and soaring unemployment, now at 10 percent. It also failed to live up to its original promise: creating millions of jobs by forcing employers to hire more people.

The conservative-dominated National Assembly, France's lower house, voted overwhelmingly yesterday to adopt a government-backed bill that significantly waters down the 35-hour week legislation, a legacy of the former Socialist administration. It opens the door for companies to increase employees' working time in exchange for better pay.

President Jacques Chirac's government has tried to sell the overhaul as an opportunity to "Work More to Earn More," but many remain unconvinced.

Almost a million people joined strikes and demonstrations earlier this month to defend the 35-hour week and protest other perceived threats to their working conditions and pay. The antipathy could spill over into a May referendum on the new EU constitution, in which the government is campaigning for a "yes" vote.

The new law endorses an increase in extra hours that employees can work to 220 every year from the previous limit of 180. It allows them to go further with "optional overtime" in return for extra pay and lets them sell part of their holiday entitlement back to their employers or put it toward early retirement, training or sabbatical leave.

But trade unions doubt that the extra time will be quite as optional as promised -- especially for people working in small companies. "Officially, they can say no; in practice, it's less certain," said Remi Jouan, national secretary of the CFDT, France's largest union. "It won't be the employee that chooses; it's the employer that decides whether there's work or not."

Jouan believes the main impact of the reform will be felt when, or if, France's economy picks up and companies increase hours instead of hiring. "That's our problem with this reform," he said. "It's just not an answer to unemployment."

Left-wing deputies also lined up to criticize the new bill. Socialist lawmaker Alain Vidalies called it "economically absurd and socially unjust."

Most concede that the original 35-hour workweek -- introduced on a voluntary basis in 1998 and made compulsory two years later -- has failed to create the promised millions of jobs.

A parliamentary committee chaired by conservative deputy Herve Novelli last year asserted that the shorter workweek had cost the state upward of 10 billion euros ($13 billion) a year. It also disputed a labor ministry report that it had created 350,000 jobs in its first five years.

Novelli welcomed yesterday's vote, saying the 35-hour law had brought a "salary stagnation that is now difficult to emerge from."

According to a 2003 OECD survey of 25 industrialized countries, only Norwegian and Dutch employees worked less time each year than the French, who put in an average 1,431 hours. Americans employees worked 1,792 hours.