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To protect workers’ representatives, French law requires the employer to seek authorization from the labor administration. For the last decade, however, this legal purview has been sharply criticized. This article analyses some of these failures by studying 256 recent cases judged by the administrative courts of Paris since 1997 and of Caen since 1995. These decisions provide information about how the administration and employers respect the law and about the difficulties of its application. They show the theoretical efficiency of a claim, but they stress the frequent lack of concrete results. They also reveal some perverse effects of an administrative judge’s competence.