Legal Question in Employment Law in Washington

Re: Civil rights violation?

Your boss is wrong in several ways.

First, he is threatening to terminate you for exercising your statutory rights, which would qualify as wrongful termination. Put in plain English, in Washington State, you can be fired for many reasons, including many unfair and unjust reasons. The list of reasons that are illegal is actually very short, but one of them is for exercising your rights under the law. If he is forbidding you to file a claim with a federal or state agency, he's saying, "If you exercise your rights under the law, I'll fire you."

In addition, even if you are not in a union shop, the laws about collective bargaining give you certain rights. One of these is the right to talk with your fellow workers about your working conditions, so in addition to the right to talk with enforcement agencies about how he treats you, you also have the right to discuss it with your coworkers.

However, unless your boss is at the top of the food chain (i.e., the owner of the company), you might actually get better results by talking about this with HIS boss.

Good luck.