The Author looks into the first judicial application of Act n. 223/1991 on collective dismissals, which has implemented the 1975 EEC directive. In the first place, the Author examines how the new definition of collective dismissals (the main elements of which are the number of employees belonging to the enterprise and the number of redundancies) has been applied by courts. Then, he takes into account the collective and administrative pro-cedure, which plays the main role in the law, and the rules to choose the workers to be made redundant. Fínally, the Author notes that even under this law the relationship between preventive and procedural control, on the one hand, and the control of the substantial legitimacy of collective dismissals, on the other, re-mains unresolved