This dissertation is about the use of law against discrimination in the workplace. The methodology mixes ethnographical observations, qualitative interviews with victims and law intermediaries, archive analysis and statistics. It analyses resources and skills used to denounce discrimination before courts. The first part deals with the plurality of anti-discrimination law genesis and their various moral justifications. The second part is about the actions undertaken by the French agency Haute autorité de lutte contre les discriminations et pour l’égalité in order to enforce the law. The third part deals with individual complaints of discrimination victims and the last part analyses the use of law by a trade union and an anti-discriminatory organization – CGT and SOS Racisme. This research outlines different challenges faced by all parties to fulfill law requisites, to deal with individual demands of fair treatment, and to implement norm of equality. Those three distinct dimensions are potentially contradictory. Still despite those difficulties, institutions and activists try to find a way “however precarious” of reconciling enforcement of law, assistance to victims, and “politicization” of individual grievances.
