PARIS — President François Hollande's attempt to overhaul France's labor system is in peril again as the bill's rapporteur warned Monday the government lacked a majority to pass it in parliament, and violence again marred protests.

The proposed changes to France's lengthy labor code aim to make it easier to hire and fire workers. Hollande needs the so-called "El Khomri" law to burnish his legacy as a reformer and prove to France's European partners the country can make structural changes to stimulate an economy dogged by high unemployment.

But after several rounds of revisions and attempts to pay off the bill's main opponents, Hollande and his left-wing government still lacked enough support in a Socialist-ruled parliament to guarantee the bill will be able to pass, its rapporteur told Le Parisien. That means the government may have to use a special decree to force the bill through, and risk further alienating rebellious left-wing factions inside the ruling majority.

"Today, we are about 40 votes short to gain majority and pass the law," said Socialist MP Christophe Sirugue.

He added the government may try to bring some 20 MPs on side by offering further concessions on the bill, which has already been extensively rewritten and amended to consider objections. The government has yet to give way on some of the bill's key aspects, including one that will make it easier for firms to negotiate in-house labor deals and get around national restrictions, and one that will change the way firms' economic health is evaluated in case of dismissals.

In France, companies must present a business case when firing workers. The bill would make it slightly harder to dispute the firm's argument by referring to profits accumulated in different regions.

"That's a red line for many of my colleagues," added Sirugues, referring to a firms' economic health. "I will propose amendments that aim to make [the evaluation scope] international again."

But it's not just the leftist fringe of Hollande's party that is opposed. Last week, the head of France's main business lobby called the bill "intolerable." The protest how much it had been watered down from the original text. Unless the government toughened it up again, he said, his lobby would walk out on a separate round of talks, this time concerning a reform of the country's deeply indebted unemployment system. Sirugues called the threat "scandalous."

Violent opposition

Lacking support in parliament, the bill is also hated by students and trade unions who mounted fresh protests in several cities Sunday with some 80,000 people attending, according to police estimates. Demonstrations were marred by violence in Paris for the second time in a week, as police clashed with masked protesters near the site of the "Nuit Debout," a sit-in protest. Two demonstrators were reported injured.

That followed vicious clashes Thursday in which 24 riot police were injured.

The trouble at home caught up with Prime Minister Manuel Valls during a trip to Australia, where he was praising an agreement to sell submarines worth some €34 billion to Canberra. Asked about the violence on the margins of the Nuit Debout movement, Valls was described by French journalists as looking irritated and then exclaiming, in the direction of his Australian counterpart, "France!"

Valls added that he was not in Australia to talk about domestic affairs and declined to answer the question.

But Nuit Debout, a vaguely defined protest movement that was born out of opposition to the labor bill, will be waiting for him when he gets back. It's been hosted at the Place de la République in northern Paris nightly for about a month, a growing headache for a left-wing government unwilling to clamp down on a youth-led movement.

On Sunday, left-wing firebrand and MEP Jean-Luc Mélenchon warned repeated clashes between protesters and police would soon lead to a death. He urged riot police to tone down their crowd-control tactics and stop beating protesters, while the police tweeted photographs of protesters trying to set fire to an underground train station and pry up paving stones to throw at police.